


strange waters

by deadlights (eurythmix)



Series: wake to answer [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Deadlights (IT), Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier-centric, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Minor Violence, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Reality Bending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:14:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24622198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurythmix/pseuds/deadlights
Summary: Eddie is dead. It’s a fact, as plain and simple as Richie’s hands on the steering wheel as he heads east. Except dead people don’t talk to you in your dreams, telling you to wake up. Dead people aren’t alive in the way Eddie most assuredly is.[on hiatus]
Relationships: Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: wake to answer [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1842844
Comments: 48
Kudos: 89
Collections: Richie/Eddie Bigbang 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> seven months, 50k+ words, a bushfire, a global pandemic and the first half of my honours degree later, here it is: my contribution to the [2019/2020 reddie big bang](https://reddiebang.tumblr.com/)! I genuinely didn't think I'd finish this but boy am I glad to be proven wrong
> 
> this fic owes its existence to so many people: [rose](http://greenfinches.tumblr.com), for always encouraging me to write even when I feel like everything I come up with is shit (and getting me into this fandom in the first place); [cait](http://hyruling.tumblr.com), for writing alongside me (check out her fic [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24515671)); my incredible artists, [paige](http://dreambreathing.tumblr.com) and [alex](http://imbadatshading.tumblr.com), for your incredible pieces (see the masterpost [here](https://eurythmix.tumblr.com/post/621867371153506304/for-the-richieeddie-big-bang-20192020)!); and finally, the mods who organised it all! they managed to coordinate this whole thing through the wildest circumstances and they deserve a huge round of applause for making it happen
> 
> a few things about this fic: firstly, it's a whole plot reference to [the sting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sting_\(Futurama\)). don't click the link unless you want to be hugely spoiled lmao
> 
> secondly, the title is from [neptune](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2V_NF4HH6A) by sufjan stevens, bryce dessner, nico muhly & james mcalister but [permutations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTzHNTjfU2Q) by lo-fang is what really inspired the tone of this fic
> 
> finally, there will be moments in this fic where you think characters are acting ooc. there's a reason for this (read: the plot this was based on)
> 
> and one last note about content warnings: I'll add specific ones at the beginning of each chapter, but I feel like you should go in knowing this fic deals heavily with themes of unreality, derealisation and character death.

Eddie didn’t want an epitaph on his gravestone. In fact, he didn’t want a grave at all; his will, faxed from his lawyer back in Brooklyn like it was 1995 or something, stipulated that Eddie was to be cremated and his ashes be interred down by the Montauk lighthouse. But there was one glaring issue, so blindingly obvious that Richie had burst into hysterical laughter when he realised: there was no body to burn. It was just another one of the many things Eddie Kaspbrak wanted and never got.

So, in lieu of a body, there was this: an empty plot in Derry Cemetery and a grim piece of slate embossed with John 15:13. It listed the usual suspects - name, date of birth, date of death, survived by his wife, so it goes - and felt cold and smooth beneath Richie’s fingertips. Too slick, too soon. He jerked his hand away and wiped it on his last pair of clean pants.

The service was over depressingly fast and Richie, in a bout of total and utter cowardice, skipped town before the wake. He turned left out of Witcham Street, hands shaking on the steering wheel, and didn't stop until he passed the state line. Richie flicked the radio on to fill the suffocating silence and landed on a station playing hits from the eighties, stuff that he could sing in his sleep. Songs that reminded him of long afternoons after school, laid flat on his single bed with headphones jammed firm over his ears, picturing himself on stage as George Michael or Holly Johnson or Neil Tennant. Songs that made him feel like opening his mouth and letting what would come, come. 

His eyes started to burn around Concord, skin prickling by Woodstock. It was only when he had collapsed on a motel bed off Highway 93 that the grief, drawn back tight like a tsunami, finally crashed.

He couldn’t tell how long he'd laid there, sobbing and screaming into the mattress. Loss, deep as the ocean and twice as heavy, pulled him inward; it could have been twenty minutes or five hours when his throat dried up and the sobs became coughs. At some point - maybe as soon as he'd entered the room, or just a second ago - he'd started to rock back and forth like a child, gripping his hair so hard it hurt. It gave him something to focus his emptiness, an epicentre to everything he couldn’t put words to - the love, the loss, the life he saw stretched before him in yawning, meticulous detail. 

Tomorrow, he knew he would get back in his car and head back to L.A. Tomorrow, he’d wake up and brush his teeth without meeting his eyes in the mirror. Tomorrow, he’d call his manager and apologise in the detached, sterile voice he had once honed as a server at In-N-Out in his twenties. Tomorrow, he would continue west and the memories would slip away one by one, mile by mile; he’d reach his condo in Santa Monica and all that would be left of Eddie was the blood in the cracks of his glasses. 

A high, anxious sound wiggled out of his throat. No, not this time; he wasn’t going to forget again, even if it hurt this badly. Even if he had to climb back down into the cistern in his dreams and watch Eddie being ripped from his arms every single night.

There was the softest hint of dawn brushing the windowsill by the time his throat had finally run dry. His whole body ached, curled up on the off-white sheets like a wrung rag, and he couldn’t find the energy to wipe away the tears and the gross shit seeping from his nose. The world, once terrifyingly vast and stranger than he ever wanted to realise, shrunk to the steady throb of his blood through his wrists. He closed his eyes and wondered why he’d never felt more alive than right here, alone in a shitty Vermont roadhouse with Eddie’s deadweight pressing down on his chest like an anchor.

And then, as if the universe hadn't screwed with Richie enough, he began to dream.

It was the dog days of ‘89, the slow weeks before Neibolt. They were hanging out in the clubhouse, still damp from a late afternoon foray in the quarry. Ben had the hammock, Mike sitting criss-cross by his feet; Bill, Stan and Bev were playing a lazy game of snap on the floor. Eddie had given up trying to read the latest volume of _Inferno_ over Richie’s shoulder, instead shoving him aside so they could both squeeze onto the milk-crate-turned-stool. He’d hooked his chin over Richie’s shoulder, breath tickling his collarbone, and something warm settled in Richie’s gut, spreading up his spine and threatening to colour his cheeks.

Madelyne Pryor was linking her mind to Jean Grey’s when Bill suggested they play truth or dare. To everyone’s surprise, it was Richie who objected.

“Guys, truth or dare is _lame_. We should play spin the bottle," he insisted, waggling his eyebrows at Bev. Without skipping a beat, she rolled her eyes.

"In your dreams, trashmouth," she said breezily, collecting Stan and Bill’s cards. Richie’s grin almost split his face. He opened his mouth to reply but the weight on his shoulder lifted.

“Why not?” Eddie piped up, and Richie swung around to stare at him, betrayed. “C’mon, Rich, don’t be a pussy.”

“Eds, you know the only pussy I’m getting is your -”

But Eddie had already left, joining the others in a circle on the floor. A hot flush of irritation, or maybe relief, prickled the hair on Richie’s arms. He scrambled off the milk crate and flopped beside Eddie, poking him in the arm until he relented and made enough space for him. Bill shot him a confused look, surprised at how easily he folded, and Richie waved him off. In his limited wisdom, some battles were better left unfought. 

“I’m starting,” Bev announced. She pointed at Stan with her half-chewed toothpick. “Truth or dare?”

She had barely finished the question when Stan replied, “Dare.”

Richie let out a low whistle. “Damn, Stanny, when did your balls drop?”

“Definitely before yours,” Stan said, not even looking over at him. “Bev?”

“Hang on, I’m thinking.” She frowned and clicked her fingers. “Shit, I didn’t think you’d pick dare. Okay. Um. Give Bill a piggy-back ride?”

Richie turned to Eddie with a put-upon sigh. “See, I told you it’d be lame.”

“Better than your dumbass idea,” Eddie said under his breath as Bill and Stan got to their feet. He’d drawn his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, tight and secure. Richie imagined Bev giving him that dare and picking up Eddie, teasing him for being so compact and portable, watching him squirm and complain but still put up with it because that’s what Eddie was like. Stubborn, quietly amused Eddie, never less than a step behind Richie, telling him his plan was stupid and always executing it to the letter.

Well, almost always. Richie wonders what would’ve happened if they did end up playing spin the bottle, whether Eddie would have left. He wonders, for the briefest of moments, what it would be like if he stayed.

Stan dropped Bill and shook out his arms. He gestured to Ben and there was another round, surely, but Richie was preoccupied, stuck in a loop of _if he stayed, if he stayed, if he stayed_. He could just laugh it off, say it was all just a game, plead the fifth and forget the whole afternoon ever happened. But if Eddie stayed, and he played, and the open neck of the bottle reached across the dusty circle and bound him in time-honoured tradition to grab Richie and - _God_. He couldn’t even think about it without feeling hot and cold all over, equal parts exhilaration and fear, muddled together until one was indistinguishable from the other.

 _Eddie’s not like that_ , he told himself firmly, and the adrenaline abruptly rushed from his veins. Even if he stayed, even if he played - it meant nothing, because Eddie was _Eddie_ , and Eddie didn’t like dirty things. Eddie couldn’t _be_ a dirty thing.

Richie swallowed. He pressed a fist against his stomach, focusing on the feel of his thumb pressing hard against his floating ribs, and willed the warmth that existed there to snuff itself out.

His own name startled him out of his daze. “Huh?”

“Truth or dare, Rich, come on,” Eddie nudged him in the ribs and tilted his head at Mike, who was staring at him, concerned. Richie shook himself and sat upright, plastering his most obnoxious grin onto his numb lips.

“Dare,” he said loudly, smacking his palms against his thighs. Stan, sitting beside Mike with one of Bev’s hair ties trapping a bunch of curls on the crown of his head, raised his eyebrows. “Lay it on me, Mikey, my man.”

Mike was quiet for a second, contemplative. “Okay,” he said slowly, “I dare you to tell us about your crush. And it can’t be Eddie’s mom,” he added with a soft, teasing smile. 

Bev burst into laughter. “Oh, man, now _this_ I want to hear.” She was looking at Richie, chin propped on her upturned palm. “Let’s go, trashmouth. You picked it.”

The thing is, Richie knew exactly what Mike was doing here. If Richie backpedalled, he’d just ask the same question as a truth. If Richie refused to answer, he was out of the game, cursed to sit on the sidelines for the rest of the afternoon. And if he did answer - well.

But Richie hadn’t won the regional debate tournament two years in a row to give up this easily. “She’s cute,” he said, not technically lying. “Real funny, too. Not funnier than me, obviously, but she’s close. And - I dunno, I guess I just like her. She’s - yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly aware of everyone’s eyes bearing down on him. “Shut up. It’s not a big deal.”

There was a moment of silence, so fragile Richie felt like even moving would shatter it, breaking the flimsy illusion he’d tried so hard to mount. His muscles tensed, waiting for one of them to laugh, to call him out on his bullshit. But then, swooping in to save Richie’s ass like the hero he was (would be, always was): “What’s her name?” Ben asked.

Richie exhaled. _Thank God for Haystack Hanscom_ , he thought fervently. “Well, Benny-boy, that’s for _me_ to know and _you_ to find out.”

Bill wrinkled his nose. “Is it Cheryl Lamonica?”

“Ew, no. She got mono from Matthew Clements.”

“No she didn’t,” Bev interjected, “that was just a stupid rumour Victor Criss started.”

“Nuh-uh, I saw her at the clinic - remember, Stan? When Eddie, like, _looked_ at a peanut and started freaking out so we took him to get checked out and there was Cheryl coming out of the exam room with -”

Stan shook his head. “That was Sally Mueller. Cheryl had already - you know.” He shifted awkwardly, the rest of his sentence hanging in the air above them all. _Cheryl had already disappeared_. There were moments when Richie forgot, just briefly, why they were together, and then it hit him like this: a horrible, aching cold filtering into the room, catching his throat and reminding him that all of this, the easy friendship and long summer days, was conditional. It came with a catch, and like most things in Richie’s life, the consequences were always waiting to pounce.

Richie turned his head, ready to restart the argument with Eddie’s input, but the space beside him was empty. Somewhere in the impromptu quarrel Eddie must have left, sneaking out before Richie could notice. It felt wrong - _deeply_ wrong - for Richie to have missed him, to not realise Eddie was gone before it was too late. His stomach lurched at the thought, reacting so violently he was convinced he was about to spew all over the clubhouse floor.

He was standing before he realised what he was doing, climbing the ladder when his mind caught up to his body. There was no sound behind him, no one following him up into the real world, but that didn’t feel as unsettling as the fact that Eddie was gone. He pulled himself onto the forest floor, panting a little, and clambered to his feet. 

“Eddie?” he called, voice wavering. The Barrens were silent despite the honey-warm sunlight filtering through the trees; life, or whatever Richie was picking his way through now, had frozen around him. No squirrels in the underbrush, no gentle lapping from the quarry, no distant hum of traffic. Just this: a pure fractal of July, fixed like a photograph. A memory.

He called Eddie’s name again, stepping over a thatch of fallen pine needles. The further he went, the more the underbrush blurred together, its features sinking into each other to create an endless expanse of green. He should feel panicked, and maybe he was a little, but there was a far greater anxiety crawling up his throat, and it wouldn’t dissipate until he found Eddie in whatever this was.

Except he did find Eddie, sitting on a log with his back to Richie. He was looking down at his hands, lost in thought. Richie approached him, ribs squeezing his heart in a death-grip, when Eddie spoke.

“It was me, wasn’t it?”

Richie paused. He was close enough to reach out and touch Eddie’s back, his shoulder, the soft line of his neck. 

_This isn’t how it went_ , he thought distantly. _This isn’t how it’s supposed to go_. But Eddie was waiting, quiet and patient, and there was a weightlessness to Richie’s body that loosened his tongue. “Yeah,” he whispered, not daring to raise his voice any louder.

Eddie didn’t move. Richie’s throat filled with shame, acrid and hot, but he couldn’t find it in himself to take it back. Instead, he walked over and sat beside Eddie, careful not to look at him but to stare out at the expanse of the Barrens that hazily stretched before them like a watercolour painting. The longer he looked, the blurrier it became, his eyes trying and failing to focus on any one thing besides the clear lines of Eddie in his peripheral. 

Finally, Eddie spoke again. “I hoped it was me,” he said, and Richie’s chest tightened. He had shifted, drawing one leg closer to his body so he could face Richie. “Look at me,” Eddie murmured, far too serious for a thirteen year old kid. His hands, dry and cool, came to rest on Richie’s flushed cheeks, turning his head.

Without warning or hesitation, Eddie pressed a gentle, chaste kiss to his lips. Richie’s limbs flooded with warmth, his entire nervous system alight and glowing, and he pressed back. His hand settled on Eddie’s waist, cautious, but despite the instinctive fear that clung to the coattails of Richie’s bone-deep feelings for Eddie, something told him this was okay. It would be okay. He was allowed to be brave, just this once.

_I think I got it, Richie, I think I killed it for real!_

Richie reeled back, eyes wide. Eddie was staring at him calmly, hands still cradling Richie’s jaw. “This isn’t how it happened,” Richie said, and Eddie smiled sadly. His thumb stroked Richie’s cheekbone, slow, like he was committing the feel of it to memory.

“You wish it did,” he replied gently. Richie reached up to grasp at his wrists as the face in front of him twisted, aged, turned white and scared and bloodied. Around them the cavern was collapsing, falling apart at the seams, and Eddie’s eyes were slipping shut. His arms began to sag, nothing left to hold on to Richie.

Richie gathered him in his arms. “Yeah,” he choked out, gripping the body as tight as his aching muscles would allow, and then some. “I do.” He shut his eyes against the green light and trembling walls, buried his face in Eddie’s hoodie, and held on while the world around him faded to grey. “God, Eddie, I do.”

* * *

He woke with a strangled noise, clawing at his chest. For a terrifying minute he didn’t know where he was, filled with the same pressing anxiety that had hit him the moment he entered Neibolt again. In slow increments, as measured as the setting sun streaking its light onto his rumpled bed, the world settled into itself. The angles became familiar again, the lines of the motel room straightening themselves into something coherent, routine. He’d stayed in hundreds of places like this, each room - no matter how fancy the bedspread - blending into a seamless framework for most of his adult life. His body, still humming with adrenaline, relaxed instinctively; this was home, however temporary. 

That was, until he remembered Eddie.

Richie pressed the heels of his palms hard against his eyes. _He’s gone_ , a hollow, resonant part of him said quietly. The weight on his chest throbbed. _He’s gone for real._ For a moment there he swore it felt okay, like Eddie was just in the bathroom, silent in between spitting his toothpaste out and continuing to rant about the state of the shower. Like the rightness of the universe depended on Eddie having enough breath in his lungs to argue with its constitution.

But when he opened his eyes again, the room was still. The sun had fully set and the street lamps bloomed. In the distance, a dog was barking. The universe didn’t give a shit about Eddie, and life would go on as it always had without him there to criticise it - _that_ was real. The phantom brush of Eddie’s hand on Richie’s cheek wasn’t, however much he wished it was.

And, fuck, Richie really wished it was real. 

He was startled out of his thoughts by his phone chiming on the bedside table. His agent, probably, or Bill making good on his promise to check in. Whoever it was, the idea of talking tasted like bile on Richie’s tongue. He wasn’t even sure there were words that could encompass the enormity of what was only barely staying beneath his skin. It wasn’t grief, because that alone Richie could deal with; he bore it when his mom passed, when his college girlfriend told him he was too much, when he realised he’d left pieces of himself lodged in the splinters of Neibolt. This was a kindness, too, something that existed without time or place, something that he couldn’t forget if he tried.

His phone beeped again. Ignoring it, Richie stood and made his way to the bathroom, body on autopilot. The last hazy tendrils of sleep still clung to his limbs, cotton-soft and heavy; it would be so easy to just lie back down and shut his eyes against the growing headache in his temples. It was a temptation he’d paid credence to a lot when his career was finding its legs - hindsight called it depression, but twenty-two year old Richie called it necessary. 

And speaking of depressing, the bathroom attached to his room was everything wrong with the world condensed into 5’ by 8’ of mold and mildew. If Eddie were here - and, God, didn’t that feel like a kick in the gut - he would’ve slammed the door, marched over to the office and demanded a new room. Or better yet, another place to stay, somewhere that could call itself a hotel without miming inverted commas over the ‘h’. 

He showered quickly, partly because the water pressure was abysmal and it felt like he was being pissed on by an incontinent German Shepherd. It was the unsettling feeling of being watched that made him skip out on the tiny bottles of complementary shampoo and conditioner, a paranoia he couldn’t shake despite the very obvious, very painful fact that he was alone. As he stepped out of the shower he felt a rush of vertigo, visceral enough to bring acid to the back of his throat, and he braced himself against the sink until it passed. But the wrongness, whatever it was, refused to budge. It was wedged between the atoms that made up the porcelain under his shaking hands, stuck in the distance between Richie and his reflection in the desilvering mirror. 

“Get it together,” he muttered to himself, snatching the threadbare towel from the hook. He dried off in sharp, hasty motions, and avoided catching his own eye in the small crooked mirror. 

He slipped out of the bathroom and made his way over to his bag, hoping he’d had some foresight in packing an extra pair of clean boxers. He didn’t actually remember packing; the hours between Mike’s call and pulling up at the restaurant were muddied, overflowing with a sticky kind of dread that dulled the lines of his memory. 

But when he unzipped his duffle, he wasn’t met with boxers, clean or otherwise. The first thing he saw was a TSA-approved toiletries bag full of clear containers and travel-sized dental products. Underneath was a packing cube - a fucking _packing cube_ \- with a stack of carefully folded, painfully inoffensive shirts and slacks. Richie continued to dig through the bag he was beginning to realise was not, in fact, his, when his fingers brushed against the smooth edge of an envelope.

He yanked it out from the bottom of the duffle, hands trembling. _Richie_ , it said in Eddie’s cramped handwriting, and all the air in Richie’s lungs ignited at once. 

His entire body jolted, thunderstruck, and the envelope slipped from his fingers. The sheer absurdity of the situation sent bubbles of hysterical laughter to the surface. The rest of Eddie’s belongings - at least, a handful of them, packed into a plain black duffle bag that looked so similar to Richies’ on first glance that it’s no wonder he mistook it for his own - lay akimbo, perfectly innocuous, still smelling faintly of packing plastic. It could be anyone’s bag, except for the cream-coloured stain that was tucked so neatly beneath the layers of flawless impersonality. _Of course_ , Richie thought to himself, chest tight. _Of_ fucking _course_. 

He couldn’t move for a long minute. Then, without warning, like an elastic band finally snapping: “Jesus _Christ_ , Eddie.”

The letter was seized from the floor and torn open. Richie couldn’t tell if it was just his hands or the entire universe that was shivering, disturbed at its seams; if he’d ever felt apprehension before, it was nothing compared to this. He managed to fit his pinky under the flap and split the envelope in two, careful not to shred the single piece of paper inside.

With a start, Richie recognised the stationery: stamped at the top was the letterhead of the Derry Townhouse in faded blue. Below that was an inky mess, made indecipherable by the onslaught of tears clouding Richie’s eyes. He didn’t bother blinking them back, standing there with the last traces of Eddie blurred in his palms. Reading it, making sense of the last piece of evidence that Eddie was here, he was a person that existed outside Richie’s fragile memories - it felt like giving in. It felt like admitting Eddie was really gone.

When Richie had moved from Maine to California after high school, the image of Eddie in his mind didn’t disappear immediately. It was slow, cloying; he’d go out for drinks with college friends and someone would complain about the music and Richie would sit there, swathed in a familiar voice that lived at the very back of his brain but had no name. Sometimes he’d see a pair of wide brown eyes or a patch of freckled skin and his stomach would twist, half-terrified, like he’d missed a step. 

Even when Eddie wasn’t in his life, Richie remembered him - not in the way that he could remember his middle name or the way he parted his hair, but something far deeper. The way the ocean knew the moon: instinctual, unbidden. More natural than breathing. 

The topmost line swam into vision. _Rich, I don’t know if you’ll even see this_ -

He couldn’t do it.

If asked, Richie couldn’t say what happened next. He knew he dressed himself, and checked out of the motel, and even managed to pull out of the parking lot and onto the highway once more. There was nothing behind it, though, like the meaning had been scrubbed dry; a cog without distinction, functioning without purpose. He didn’t know where he was heading, or why he was even driving. His mind was untethered, humming like an untuned radio. The only thing he returned to, if he was returning to anything at all, was the shape of Eddie’s Rs, narrow and lopsided. The same shape they had always been.

“You’re an idiot.”

Richie swerved just in time to avoid plowing into a semi heading a hundred miles towards him in the opposite lane. He slammed on the brakes, stopping dead in the middle of the highway, breathing heavily.

_It’s just your mind playing tricks on you. It’s just a memory. It’s just -_

“A total fucking moron,” Eddie said. He sat calmly in the passenger seat, hands folded on his lap as he stared out at the empty road. There was a wholeness to him despite the gaping wound in his chest, no longer bleeding but still severed, displaying his organs - _was that his fucking spleen, oh God, oh fuck_ \- like a Halloween spectacle. 

Richie threw open the driver’s door and vomited onto the road. There was barely anything in his stomach but the nausea kept rising, clawing up his spine and refusing to let go. And all the while, Eddie continued to speak.

“I don’t know how you managed to live by yourself for twenty years,” he mused, seemingly oblivious to Richie gagging beside him, “if this is the kind of reckless bullshit you pulled. Or is it dumb luck that’s kept you alive all this time?” He chuckled, soft and warm. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, Rich, just keep going, okay? Dumb son of a bitch.”

“Eddie,” Richie gasped, lurching back in his seat. He stretched across the divide and frantically touched every bit of Eddie he could reach. He was solid under Richie’s palms, skin warm and alive, and he couldn’t help himself - he laughed, open and relieved. “Fuck, Eddie, you’re alive. You’re fucking alive. Oh, fuck, what -”

But Eddie interrupted, catching his wandering hands in his own and tugging them close to the yawning hole of his ribcage. “Never pull anything like that again, you hear me?” he said, eyes pinning Richie to his seat. The fury behind them left him speechless; it was a fire so quintessentially _Eddie_ that Richie didn’t realise he missed so much until it had been extinguished. “Jesus Christ, Richie. I can’t lose you again.”

“You didn’t,” Richie said, dazed. “I’m - Eddie, you didn’t lose me. You never lost me. Fuck, man,” he laughed breathlessly, “I thought I lost you! How did you get out? What the fuck is this?” He wriggled out of Eddie’s grasp and gestured to the wound. “How are you fucking _breathing_? Fuck, we’ve got to get you to a hospital. Shit. I don’t even know where we are -”

Eddie’s brows drew together. Any amusement that lingered on his face disappeared, clouded by a kind of quiet anxiety that spread cold tendrils across Richie’s skin. “Just - wake up, Rich. Please.”

“What?”

But Eddie was shaking his head, eyes wet. “Please,” he murmured, voice cleaved in two. Richie gaped at him, hands hovering above the laceration, frozen with indecision. He wasn’t making any fucking sense was the thing - Eddie never really made sense, at least not to most people, but Richie always knew what he meant, no matter how inarticulate. Waves, moontide - the principle was the same. Some things should work without explanation.

“Eds, come one,” he said, gripping Eddie’s shoulders. The fabric felt stiff and gummy with blood and the nausea rose again, threatening to shroud his vision. He swallowed woodenly and pressed his fingertips in harder until they hit bone. “Tell me what to do, man. I don’t know what’s going on and I’m really starting to freak out, okay? Shit. What the fuck is happening?” He shook Eddie, desperate. “Eddie, tell me what to do!”

“Richie,” Eddie whispered, “wake up.”

* * *

He jolted upright with the blare of a truck horn as it flew past. Taking huge, gasping breaths, Richie took in the scene around him, the cold lights of the rest stop glowing through the windshield. It must have been midnight or its bookend hours, and he was parked by the air compressor at what could be any gas station in the country. About twenty yards away a group of men were crowded around a pick-up, laughing. If he shut his eyes and focused, he could almost hear crickets chirping in the undergrowth.

Richie groaned and dropped his forehead against the steering wheel. “Shit.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: mild suicidal ideation, mention of prescription drug abuse, the city of philadelphia

Instead of catching the next flight to L.A., Richie decided to drive. His agent thought this was a terrible idea. Richie thought so too, but he wasn’t going to admit that he’d officially lost it to the last person on Earth who got even a hairsbreadth close to trusting him. 

"I'll see you in a week, then," Mandy said when he’d finished explaining. Richie changed lanes, rolling his eyes as he sped past a SUV with a God bless America bumper sticker. "Try not to kill yourself passing through North Dakota."

"Yikes, who ruined the Midwest for you?" he teased. It was comforting, in a way, that they still had the same relationship; he was doing something monumentally stupid, and she was back in California regretting her decision to represent him. Just like old times. 

Mandy sighed heavily. There was a rustling over the line, like she was grabbing her work diary and scribbling something in it. "You have no idea." The sound of a pen clicking, then: “Call me when you reach New Mexico. I’m spending the weekend in Sacramento with my mom, so don’t bother calling before then.”

“Yeesh, good luck with that.” Richie glanced over at his phone mounted on the dash; it was Thursday, surprisingly. He wasn’t quite sure when he started forgetting what day it was but the realisation didn’t feel as disorienting as it should. Maybe it was a hangover from his twenties, when he fucked up his circadian rhythm so badly that he still had trouble falling asleep at what Mandy would call a reasonable hour. There was something about frogs in boiling water here, but Richie was too tired to make sense of his own disjointed thoughts. 

Mandy hung up with one last half-hearted plea for him to not make an even bigger idiot of himself on his impromptu cross-country roadtrip. The sudden silence of the cab felt sobering, like her sharp, warm voice had lulled him into thinking nothing had changed. 

In most ways - the ways that didn’t count, not really - the world moved on like it always had. The sun took its sweet time climbing up a cloudless horizon; cows raised their heads in quiet judgment as he zipped past rolling grey-green hills; the local radio station was playing more 80s hits, because apparently that’s all anyone wanted to listen to on the east coast. He wasn’t complaining, exactly - any day was a good day for George Michael, in his expert opinion - but it almost felt unfair that things should keep going. 

What was that old Auden poem his dad liked? _Stop all the clocks_? Richie thought that was depressing as hell when he was a kid. Now it just felt - well, as plain as his hands, ten-and-two on the steering wheel. Obvious. Factual.

Fact: Eddie was dead.

Fact: Richie had some weird-ass, trippy dream where he _wasn’t_ dead.

Fact: Richie needed to get his head screwed on straight ASAP, or he’d definitely lose his shit before reaching San Francisco.

And with those three certainties in mind, Richie flicked his turn signal and drove on to the city of brotherly love.

* * *

Richie had barely passed Philadelphia’s city limits when someone rear-ended him - and, God, he wished he could say that was a double entendré.

“Hey, asshole! Learn to read a fuckin’ sign!”

The huge Jeep that collided with him - and Richie would swear on his mom’s grave that _they_ collided with _him_ \- sped past, the driver throwing him a two-fingered salute. Richie returned the favour without much enthusiasm; sure, he was tempted to chase down the dumbass and give them a piece of his mind, but he was just too tired. He sighed and switched lanes, resigning himself to making a pit stop in a city that seemingly held the same regard for him as he did for it.

He stopped at a Wawa and inspected the damage. The trunk had popped open and refused to click shut, no matter how hard Richie pressed. The fender, though still intact, had a noticeable dent, and Richie had paid enough attention to his Uncle Rudy’s erstwhile mechanics lessons to know that was a bad sign. Thankfully he’d had enough wherewithal after Mike called to add insurance to his rental, but the girl on the hotline said he couldn’t get a replacement for two days. The Eagles were in the playoffs, she said, it was a busy period for them; when Richie said the NFL season hadn’t even started yet, she hung up.

“Fucking typical,” he muttered, slamming the driver’s door shut. He stalked towards the Wawa, fists thrust deep in his pockets, and asked for the umpteenth time why the universe had it out for him so bad.

It made sense, then, that the coffee machine was broken.

“There’s a Dunkin Donuts down the road,” the cashier said without a hint of apology in his voice, and Richie grimaced.

“Hard pass. You got any Prolab?”

The cashier looked at him strangely. “No…?”

“Red Bull?”

“Sold out.”

“Jesus Christ, what the fuck _do_ you have?”

He shrugged. “We got hoagies.”

Five minutes later Richie left with what could be called a hoagie in the loosest definition of the term. He scarfed it down in the parking lot, idly scrolling through his Twitter feed and steadfastly ignoring the number of texts he had accumulated. However midway through a video of a puppy barking in its sleep, a new notification appeared. _Bill: Just reached LAX. Are you in town?_

“Shit,” he mumbled into his sandwich. He and Bill had made plans to meet up in California back at the Orient, ostensibly for Richie to meet Bill’s wife and try to explain why they were suddenly all chummy after twenty-seven years of radio silence. The Richie that existed that night - scared shitless but still bright and bold, still hopeful - felt like an entirely different person, one he wasn’t sure could be found again.

With a pang of guilt he swiped the notification away. _I’ll get to it later_ , he told himself, _when I’m not sleep deprived in a Wawa parking lot_. He needed a full night’s sleep, preferably one without fucked up emotionally-charged nightmares, to deal with the life he’d been unceremoniously thrown in to.

A quick Google search informed him that there was a Hilton only two blocks away, and a phone call confirmed rooms were available. Maybe the girl from the rental company was right, because the streets looked pretty empty to him - in fact, the further he drove through South Philly, the less people he saw. Sure there would be more people left in the city, right?

 _Something’s wrong_ , a quiet voice warned in the back of his mind. It almost sounded like Stan. _Get out of here_.

But just as the thought occurred to him he was pulling up at the hotel. A bored-looking concierge knocked on his window and started the usual spiel - _welcome to DoubleTree on Broad street, do you have a reservation, blah blah blah_ \- giving Richie an opportunity to shove his mental-Stan further into the depths of his brain. He didn’t need any more anxiety to ice the cake that was his thoroughly paranoid mental equilibrium. 

The check-in went smoothly and before he knew it he was closing the door on the 26th floor suite, exhaling heavily. He wasn’t sure at what point he’d asked for a room this large but the long, clean lines loosened the ever-present knot in his chest. There was something about the space, white and open with a view that stretched beyond the Schuylkill, that felt safe. 

It was no wonder that he fell asleep after barely a minute of lying down on the bed, shoes and all.

He knew it was a dream the moment Eddie rounded the corner, smiling gently. He was carrying two plates in his hands and set one down in front of Richie, who was sitting at a small dining table. The apartment around him was cosy but impersonal, like something out of a _Bed, Bath & Beyond _ catalogue. Richie shook his head and pushed back from the table.

“Nope, not doing this again,” he announced. He spun on his heel looking for a door, but instead found a floor-length window looking out over what he realised with a jolt was San Francisco bay. It was mid-morning, sunlight glittering on the soft waves - the perfect day. Eddie placed a hand on his shoulder, thumb rubbing soothingly at the juncture of his neck - the perfect life.

“I can’t keep doing this,” Richie whispered, mouth dry. “I can’t - this is fucking insane.”

“This is nuts,” Eddie echoed. “I don’t get it.”

Richie turned, spluttering. “Wh- _you_ don’t get it? Jesus, Eddie, you’re fucking dead, it’s _me_ who’s losing my Goddamn mind here.” He raised his hand to Eddie’s and squeezed. It was whole, just like before, and warm. He could almost smell Eddie’s cologne, the sharp citrus mellowed by a herbal tang that he’d absentmindedly noticed on their visit to the Clubhouse. He didn’t even know he could remember something so minute in such vivid detail, enough for his own brain to fuck with him this hard. 

Eddie pulled away. Despite the relief evident in his eyes his brow was furrowed. “It worked, though,” he said, more to himself than Richie. 

“What worked?” Richie asked, but Eddie was already walking away, rounding the corner he’d appeared from. With tingling legs and an overwhelming sense of vertigo, Richie followed.

It was a kitchen, as pristine and austere as the living room, but somehow Eddie made it feel more like home. He was by the stove, humming to himself as he poured batter onto a griddle. The room was filled with a gentle sizzle and the sugar-sweet scent of pancakes; it was like he was back home in Derry in the summers before everything fell apart, with his mom making breakfast while his dad read aloud from the newspaper. 

“I didn’t think it would,” Eddie said, interrupting his nostalgia. He was still facing the griddle, lifting the edge of a pancake to check its underside. “Which sounds harsh, but I didn’t. They said they’d never seen anything like this before.” He clicked his tongue and dropped the pancake back on the pan. “Bet you would’ve loved that. Being the first.”

Richie opened his mouth, a dumb joke slipping onto his tongue on instinct, but Eddie beat him to it. “And then you’d be all, _well, I was your mom’s first, so I guess that tracks_.” He flipped the pancake and patted it down with the back of the spatula. “Idiot.”

“You walked right into that,” Richie pointed out. He couldn’t quite follow the conversation but this, at least, was familiar ground. “And for the record I was going to say, ‘I would love to be _your_ first, Spageds’. Mrs K was a generous lover, but I think it’s time to move on. Aid in the grieving process, you know.” 

Eddie snorted. It was the same thing he did as a kid when one of Richie’s Voices caught him off guard and make him laugh so hard he had to reach for his inhaler. Emboldened, Richie continued. “There’s no way you and your wife have done the dirty. Is she Catholic or something? ‘Cause I’ve never seen a man so sexually frustrated in my life, and we’re from _Maine_ , dude. Fuck pine cones, the state flower should be blue _balls,_ am I right?” 

Eddie’s shoulders were shaking - in laughter, hopefully. Richie was frozen in place, his feet planted by the doorway as Eddie carried on making pancakes. Even with the knowledge that this was all a dream concocted from the most masochistic parts of his sleeping mind, there was something painfully real about the way Eddie moved, the motion of his shoulder blades through his thin tee shirt. Dimly, Richie recognised it as one of his own shirts, a piece he’d picked up in the semester he spent at UCLA in the 90s. It fit loosely on Eddie, the shoulders a touch too broad, and Richie ached to push the fabric aside and press his lips to the freckled nape of his neck. 

He swallowed and rocked back on his heels. It might be a dream but crossing that line felt far too real. 

“Your manager called,” Eddie said, placing the last pancake on the plate.

“Steve?” Richie snorted and followed Eddie back into the living room. He laid the pancakes in the centre of the small table and gestured for Richie to sit. “Hasn’t he been up my ass enough?”

Eddie disappeared back into the kitchen for a brief moment and returned with a pot of coffee. “He said something about you screening his calls.” He poured Richie a cup, a wry smile ticking up the corner of his mouth. “And how you bombed your last set. It’s on Instagram, you know.”

Richie groaned and dumped a hefty spoonful of sugar into his coffee. “Please don’t tell me it’s gone viral.”

“It’s gone viral,” Eddie confirmed, laughing openly. He settled opposite Richie and scooted his chair close to the table. His fingers brushed Richie’s as he reached for the small milk jug by his coffee. Richie shivered but didn’t pull away. 

“Didn’t you crash your car when Mike called?” Richie pointed out. “I feel like that’s kind of worth noting. Pot meet kettle, or whatever.”

But Eddie didn’t hear him, or chose not to. “I told him that this wasn’t the best time to call, and you know what that fucker did? He hung up on me.” Eddie huffed and aggressively stabbed at the topmost pancake, dragging it onto his plate. “Is that a California thing? Aren’t you supposed to be all, you know,” he waved his fork around, “free love stoners or something?”

“You’re thinking of San Fran, mi amigo. Hollywood is full of anal, repressive types.” Richie paused. “Actually, you know what? You’d fit right in.”

He shot Eddie a winning grin and dug into his pancakes. They were exactly like the ones his mom made, heavy on the vanilla and best smothered in copious amounts of maple syrup. He had half a mind to ask Eddie where he found her old recipe book when he noticed the silence.

He glanced up. Instead of the reply he was expecting - a casual _fuck you, Rich_ , with the twisted little scowl that followed Richie like the irate silver lining through his whole childhood - there was Eddie, hands folded under his chin, face carefully blank. He didn’t even blink when Richie waved a hand in front of his eyes.

“Cat got your tongue, Eds?” He joked weakly. The tendons in Eddie’s forearms tensed, his body taut as a tightrope and equally perilous. There was something about the way he haunched in on himself, eyes fixed to the table but not seeing, that edged the sense of foreboding in Richie’s stomach from worry to proper anxiety.

He couldn’t ignore it anymore. “What’s going on, Eddie?” Richie asked quietly. Eddie exhaled and scrubbed a hand over his face. The rosy veneer from earlier had slipped; he looked like he hadn’t slept in days, haggard and exhausted. Before Richie’s eyes the front of his shirt bloomed with red, seeping over the faded logo and weighing down the thin fabric. 

“No,” Richie choked, paralysed in his seat as the blood continued to trickle down Eddie’s chest. “No, no, please - why is this happening?” He reached across the table and latched on to Eddie’s wrist. “Eddie, come on, help me! What the fuck is happening?”

Eddie finally met his gaze, eyes bright and glassy. Richie’s heart dropped to his shoes. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. A thick well of blood gathered at the corner of his mouth and began to ooze down his chin, leaving broad streaks down his suddenly pale throat. “I’m so fucking sorry, Richie.”

“No, no, shut up, we’re going to figure this out.” Richie’s hands fluttered uselessly over Eddie. He swore in frustration and pushed back from the table, racing around to kneel by Eddie’s seat.

His knees met stone, slick and cold. The undulating lights above them throbbed and cast Eddie’s wan face in a sick green haze. Richie reached out, frantically pressing his jacket against the wound, but they both knew it was over before he even thought to try.

“Eddie! Eddie, stay with me, man, come on -”

“Richie,” Eddie coughed, reaching out blindly. Richie took his hand and squeezed, fingernails digging into Eddie’s knuckles. “Richie - you’ve gotta do something for me.”

Richie’s lungs crumpled, his breaths coming shorter than Eddie’s. “Yeah, Eds?” 

“Just -” Eddie pulled their joined hands to his lips. It wasn’t quite a kiss - nothing quite so real - but Richie’s skin burned all the same. Eddie pulled back, his eyes clearer, more determined. He studied Richie’s face like he was committing it to memory, and as the world around them began to fall apart, he murmured, “Wake up, Richie.”

And Richie woke.

* * *

He wasn’t surprised in the slightest when Steve called that evening.

“What,” he answered, throwing Eddie’s bag onto the bed and digging through it for something to wear. There was an incredulous noise on the other end of the phone.

“What?” Steve repeated, slow and dangerous. “You go ghost for three weeks and all I get is, ‘what’?”

Richie held up a polo - size medium, it would fit like a crop top on Richie’s torso if he was lucky. He tossed it to the side. “I told you, man, I had some shit to deal with.”

“ _You_ had shit to deal with? Oh, okay, Richie, so TMZ breathing down my fucking neck asking if you’ve been hospitalised _again_ is just a regular day’s work, huh? Calling Amazon and begging them - and I mean begging, hands on fucking knees, Richard - not to cancel _our_ contract, which I worked for months to get - how’s that for shit to deal with?”

Richie rolled his eyes. “Dude, I’ve gone MIA before. Just tell TMZ some shit about a family friend dying.” Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a lie, and the realisation sent a cold shiver down his spine. He threw aside a business shirt - seriously, what did Eddie think they were going to do in Derry, _negotiate_ Pennywise to death? - and started on the next packing cube. 

“I don’t think you realise how monumental this fuck up was, Richie.” Steve sniffed; it was a nervous tic that had irritated the hell out of Richie from the moment they met nearly two decades ago. Pointing it out now, while Steve was on the brink of cardiac arrest, was a dick move that even Richie was hesitant to make. “We’ve been through some shit, but this - you abandoned the tour,” he sighed, “and that’s worse than going on a bender or - or whatever the fuck you’ve done. Just - get back to L.A. Mandy said you had some dumb idea of driving back - don’t. Tell me where you are and I’ll book a flight. We might be able to fix this.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

There was a long pause. Richie held his breath, a plain tee shirt grasped in his trembling fist. 

“What?”

“I said,” Richie said with a startled laugh, like he couldn’t believe he had the balls to say it, “what if I don’t want to fix this?” 

Another pause, more incredibly strained than the previous one. Richie was starting to thing he’d accidentally ended the call when Steve took a deep, sobering breath. “Okay,” he said slowly. Richie was struck with the impression he was being talked off the ledge by someone who wanted to jump themselves. “Okay. You’re going through some shit. That’s fine. But you know what, Richie?” He paused for dramatic effect, as every manager was wont to do. “You’re done.”

Richie blinked. “Uh, yeah. That’s what I was trying to say, Steve.”

“No, Richie, I mean you’re _done_. Your contract with UTA expires at the end of this year and I’m not finding you a new one. If you’re going to commit career suicide, I’m not going down with you.” 

“Okay.”

But Steve, it seemed, was on a roll. “You’re gonna be fucking blacklisted, Richie. No one’s going to give you a piece of the action for a _very_ long time. You think you can just swing back to the Laugh Factory and pick up a few gigs? No way, pal. You’re done.” He made a frustrated sound. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Yup,” Richie replied absently, holding up two pairs of near-identical socks to compare. “Loud and clear.”

“Jesus Christ,” Steve muttered. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. You’re a real piece of work, Richie.”

“Says you, Perez Hilton, and literally every person who’s met me.” He chose the thicker pair and threw the other back. “Join the club.”

“Could you at least pretend to care, just once in your life? I stuck my neck out for you, man.” Steve’s voice dropped to something uncomfortably raw that Richie very rarely heard. “Tell me what’s going on, Richie. Not as a manager, or even a friend - give me closure and tell me what the fuck is happening to you.”

And, really, what was that if not the million dollar question hanging over Richie’s entire life? The straightforward answer rotted away in his throat: _I fell in love with someone who didn’t love me back_. The longer, more painful one: _he died and I don’t know how to keep living_. Then, buried at the very bottom of his esophagus, so deep his fingernails scratched at the cavity around his heart when he tried to pull it out: _I don’t think I was ever really living in the first place_.

It wasn’t just Eddie, he realised abruptly, standing in a random hotel room in South Philadelphia. He never truly forgot Eddie, not in the way that mattered; the years between Derry and L.A. had sapped the bravery from his words, thrown a veil over the vibrant honesty that bloomed in his chest when Eddie smiled. It hadn’t made him forget Eddie, exactly. It made him forget himself, the boy with the buck teeth and too-big glasses who held onto hope like a baseball bat and came out swinging. 

“Richie?”

In short, It had made him forget the Richie Tozier who was scared shitless of being seen and opened his arms to the spotlight anyway. 

“I don’t know,” Richie admitted quietly, “but I’m trying to find out.”

Steve scoffed. “Shit, man. You could’ve at least told me what you’re on.”

“I’m not on anything.”

“Whatever, Richie.” Steve exhaled, all the wind shunted from his sails. “Try not to kill yourself before the contract expires.” 

He hung up before Richie could even think to reply. Richie listened to the dial tone, Eddie’s socks held loosely in his other hand, and wondered what the fuck he was going to do now.

Money wouldn’t be a problem, at least for a solid year or so. The rent on his condo in Santa Monica came out automatically each month and he was on good terms with his landlord; he wouldn’t be kicked out until he was rubbing pennies together to make a dollar. His tour had all but been cancelled and there were no other obligations on the horizon, save for the press tour next June on an animated movie he’d lent his voice to. Before Mike had thrown a lit match on the gunpowder scattered at the edges of his life he’d been thinking of taking a break, perhaps skipping across the border to Cancún where he’d blend into the tourist crowd. 

But the idea of kicking up his heels and getting plastered on tequila sunrises felt disingenuous somehow, like grief was supposed to be a twelve-step program followed in a New England penitentiary and Richie was plotting jailbreak. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for whatever bullshit powers-that-be to figure out that he should have been the one shish-kabobed under the Well House. He wasn’t sure what exactly he was expecting - divine retribution via demonic trapeze artist, maybe, if the universe had a theme going - and he was beginning to think that the not-knowing was a punishment in itself.

Whatever it was, he couldn’t carry it back to L.A., that much was certain. He couldn’t reconcile the Richie who lived a charade there with the one who existed now, a mess of stray jigsaw pieces trying to make one coherent puzzle. There was nothing that kept him where he was and nothing he could look towards; what the fuck kind of life was that?

He looked back down to Eddie’s bag and the caddy of medication he’d uncovered earlier. There was a layer of over-the-counter regulars resting at the top, and the further Richie dug, the more complex the names on the packages became. Percodan, Elavil, Mandrax - and Ambien. 

_Maybe Stan was onto something_ , he thought distantly. He sat with the thought for a moment, testing its weight, before rushing to the bathroom and throwing up the meager contents of his stomach.

“Stop it,” he muttered to himself, pressing his cheek against the cool porcelain. It didn’t stop the nausea from rushing back to his head, blurring his vision. “Don’t be an idiot.”

He almost wished Eddie was here; he would take whichever form of Eddie could stand to be near him, crouched by a hotel toilet and teetering at the edge of something stupid. Except those were Eddie’s drugs, he realised with a shiver. Eddie had enough prescription medication in his bag to knock out a horse - and, yeah, he might have reverted back to the scared kid who believed he needed all that shit, but maybe - just maybe - he was onto something too. 

Ritchie gagged again. Nothing but bile came, trickling down his chin and dropping in the water in slow, heavy beads. Beverly, then - he wished Bev was there, running a hand over his back and telling him it was going to be okay. It was a little selfish, imagining her with kind eyes and gentle hands; he hadn’t even said goodbye to her at the funeral. She looked pretty preoccupied with Ben anyway - and, Christ, if that didn’t send a stab of something ugly through Richie’s chest.

The others had been acting pretty strange at the funeral, and Richie assumed it was because of Eddie. With a sudden burst of clarity, so bright he winced, he was starting to suspect it was because of _him_.

He pushed himself off the floor and flushed the evidence of his minor freak-out. The mirror above the sink had been cleaned within an inch of its life and reflected the dark circles under Richie’s drooping eyes in depressingly high definition as he splashed water on his face. A proper sleep was what he needed, a full eight hours without his dead best friend making a surprise appearance and fucking with his sense of reality. He read somewhere once that sleep deprivation had the same effect as a blood-alcohol level of...something high. He couldn’t remember the exact number; his skull felt like it was stuffed full of cotton wool and soaked in bleach. 

Back in the bedroom, the innocuous bottle of Ambien sat on top of Eddie’s clothes. He knew he was tempting fate with this one, but God was he tired. He’d only need one - just enough to knock him out for a few hours. Compared to the shit he’d taken in the past, this was practically a Tylenol.

He wrestled with the cap, eventually resorting to winching the thing open with his teeth. He dry-swallowed a pill and kicked off his shoes, laying beside Eddie’s bag and his scattered clothes. It was faint, probably just a figment of Richie’s overactive imagination, but he swore he could smell Eddie’s cologne, skin-warmed and fresh. 

“Please don’t fuck with me tonight,” he murmured, grabbing a stray shirt and holding it close to his chest as he drifted off. “I can’t deal with that shit again.”

Someone out there was listening. At least, for a second he thought there was.

“Stanley?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> explicit rating comes into play in this chapter 👀

The sunflowers in the front yard faced east for the night. Stan’s fingers ghosted over the leaves closest to him, their flowers towering a foot over his head. Cicadas were clicking in the thick of Neibolt’s shrubbery and Richie silenced them with a long, loud shriek.

“Sorry I took so long,” Stan said casually. He was barely fourteen, head still wrapped in bandages. “Eddie told me what happened. He said you’re an idiot, and I have to agree.” He looked over at Richie, mouth twisted like he was holding back a laugh. “You’re probably sick of hearing that, but it’s true.”

Richie stumbled forward and reached out for Stan. When he got within an arm’s length he collapsed against him, hands scrabbling for purchase on Stan’s tiny shoulders. Christ, he was so small as a kid - but then again, so was Richie. They were so fucking _small_. “Stan,” he breathed, squeezing tight. Stan made no attempt to push him back, nor pull him in; Richie did enough work for them both, swaying in place like two slow, clumsy dancers. “Stan, I’m so fucking sorry. We should’ve never left you alone. Fuck. _Stan_.”

Stan hummed. It wasn’t an agreement, but Richie was taking what he could with greedy hands. “I was joking when I called you a pussy, yeah? I didn’t mean it. You’re not a pussy, Stan. Shit, you’ve always been so fucking brave. I wish -” he choked, eyes burning, “- I wished I’d told you. You deserved that, Stan.” He sniffed and pressed his face further into Stan’s thin shoulder. “I fucking loved you so much. I’m sorry I never said so.”

Slowly, like approaching a startled animal, Stan threaded his fingers through Richie’s hair and held fast. He didn’t say anything for the longest time, just breathing in the night with Richie; every so often he would smooth circles across Richie’s back with his free hand, down on the exhale, up on the inhale. Richie’s racing heart, if it existed at all, began to slow. 

“I missed you,” Stan whispered. Richie’s throat closed over. “I really, really missed you, Richie.”

“I miss you too,” Richie choked out. “Shit, man, I miss you every fucking day.” 

He really did, in that horribly deep-seated way he missed all the losers through the years. There was something about knowing Stan and not having him, the diamond-cut memory of his smile and the way his voice broke when he was particularly outraged, that had left Richie’s bones empty for decades. He might have felt more whole, more real if Stan had been there when Eddie died - or maybe the well of grief in him would be deeper. If anything happened to Bev or the others, he had a sneaking suspicion there wouldn’t be much left in him for mourning.

Stan pulled back and wiped at his face. It was strange; Stan cried a lot when they were kids, not out of weakness or fear but because he always felt things so immediately. The glint in Stan’s eyes, the high flush on his neck - it was just like sophomore year when they were shown that documentary on the decline in giant panda populations and Richie had turned in his seat to see Stan rubbing at his cheeks, eyes glassy and red. The urge to poke fun at him was there, sure, but a tiny nugget of maturity buried deep in his skull took Richie by the chin and forced him to look away, murmuring in his ear that some things are better left unseen and unsaid.

But he couldn’t stop looking now. Not when Stan’s face broke into a brilliant grin, watery and relieved. “You look like shit,” he said, voice steady. A surge of pride almost bowed Richie over, and he gave in to the urge to grasp Stan’s hand and squeeze it. He felt like Eddie had, warm and real, full and breathing. It was cruel, a certain soft brand of brutality that Richie would hate himself over later, but in that moment Stan was alive. He wouldn’t trade that illusion for the world.

Stan turned his palm over. He traced a finger over Richie’s heart line, feather-light, and Richie shivered. “I saw you once, you know,” he said after a minute, taking Richie’s other hand and repeating the process - heart to head to love, and back again. “In Montreal. My sister-in-law lives up there with her partner. Patty and I were in town and she saw a poster for the comedy festival, and we had a spare evening, so why not?” He chuckled quietly. “She loves your stuff. She thinks it’s kind of misogynistic, but you’re still funny. And that night - I don’t know, you were good, but I could tell something was wrong. I didn’t even remember who you were and I still knew it wasn’t you.”

Richie’s heart sank to the bottom of his stomach. He’s pretty sure he remembers the night Stan was talking about - Just for Laughs 2007, the tail-end of the first tour he hadn’t written. It was a set stuffed with ball-and-chain girlfriends and porn addiction, the kind of shit that got the numbers on Adult Swim but fell flat to a live crowd. He’d hated every minute of that performance; he didn’t realise the audience could see how much. 

“If you tell anyone what I’m about to say, I’m going to deny it ‘til the day I die,” Stan said. The stone-cold seriousness on his face made Richie smile, just a little. “But you _are_ funny, Rich. You’re just funnier when you’re you.”

Richie exhaled and scratched the back of his neck. “Well, shit, Stan, tell that to the big-wigs at Comedy Central. Apparently the gay comedian slot was filled the minute Ellen did the puppy episode.” He jerked back, frowning. “Fuck, did I just come out? That was so anticlimactic. Let me do that again -”

“Remember junior prom?”

“What?”

Stan was already wandering away, head tilted back to the stars. “Junior prom. You’d just been dumped by Cindy Chambers and told everyone it was because she had crabs, so you went stag with me and Ben.”

Richie did, in fact, remember junior prom and the absolute humiliation that coloured every second of that night. He groaned. “Staniel, I just came out to you. Can’t you be a good ally for two seconds and, I don’t know, throw me a little gay party? Like, woohoo, you’re a homosexual! Mazel tov!”

“We were hanging out by the punch,” Stan continued, completely ignoring Richie’s antics, “and you were asking where Eddie was when he walked in with Maeve O’Neill.”

“Stan -”

“I’ve never seen anyone go red so quickly,” Stan said quietly. He looked back at Richie, expression inscrutable. “You looked like you were about to march over there and start yelling in Eddie’s face or something. But then you just - froze, I guess, and ran out the back door.” 

“Yeah, ‘cause he didn’t fucking tell me he got a date with Maeve O’Neill, did he?” Richie kicked at a tuft of grass, suddenly itching for something to do, something to hit. Stan didn’t tell him to stop, or at least stop kicking dirt in his direction; if anything, he looked at him with sympathy. A bubble of fury rose in Richie’s chest, directionless and uncontrollable. 

“Eddie saw you, you know. He saw Ben follow you and came over to me and asked what your problem was, and honestly? I didn’t know.” He paused, gaze unnervingly fixed on Richie’s. “I think I do now.”

“What the fuck do you know, Stanley?” he growled, body beginning to shake. “That, what, I had a dumb fucking crush on Eddie all through high school? That I was still in love with him when he left and I still am now? What fucking good does it do? He’s gone. He’s - fuck, Stan,” he gasped, the air suddenly thinning around him, “he’s gone.”

Richie fell to his knees, taking in huge, gulping breaths. “He’s gone,” he wheezed, “he’s gone and I fucking left him down there.” It was just like that first night all over again, the panic cresting in his lungs and driving out anything that wasn’t bottomless dread. He caved in on himself, chest to thighs to dry earth. “I left him and I left you and I don’t know what to do, Stan.”

A small frame folded around his, but this time it offered no comfort. Richie felt like he was a feral animal being contained, caged for someone else’s safety while he tore himself apart. “Come back, Rich,” Stan whispered against his shoulder blades. “Wake up.”

Richie keened. “No, not you too,” he pleaded, hands coming up to bracket his head. He pressed hard against his ears, his own heartbeat throbbing between his fingertips and his skull, growing more desperate the longer Stan’s body lay against him. “Please, Stan, not you too.”

“You owe it to him,” Stan said as the night around them exploded into light. “You owe it to _you_.”

* * *

Once was a screwy happenstance. Twice was a real kick-in-the-balls coincidence. Three times was absolute bullshit.

Richie was pushing his cart aggressively through the menswear section of Walmart, grabbing items at random. Button-ups, sweatpants, tacky _Star Wars_ tee-shirts - anything that was vaguely in his size range and didn’t smell of starch and citrus cologne. Thankfully, this was a Walmart like any other in America, and everything within its walls had a familiar plastic musk that hung around long after leaving. For once, Richie didn’t give a crap about the scent of mass consumerism; if it looked like it would fit him, it went in the cart. 

He’d woken with Eddie’s shirt pressed against his damp cheek. The room felt too small, covered in eyes, and without thinking he threw on his old clothes and left the hotel. The sun had barely risen and central Philly was still waking up, a warm haze of Sunday-morning sleepiness stretching from street to riverside. He wasn’t sure how long he walked, head down and chest heavy, but eventually he looked up and there it was, in all its blue and yellow glory: a Walmart Supercenter. The answer to absolutely none of his prayers.

Richie wove between employees setting up for the day and made a beeline for the clothing section. If he were being honest - and that was becoming his _thing_ as of late, apparently - he could have easily found an American Eagle, but there was a certain anonymity to Walmart that suited him just fine. _Besides_ , he mused, steering his cart around to the confectionary aisle, _where else can you get a sweater_ and _Milk Duds in the same place?_

God bless America, and all that jazz.

He was contemplating a two-for-one deal on Junior Mints when the nauseating reality he’d been trying to ignore rushed to the surface. This was the third weird dream he’d had in as many days, and growing up in Derry meant he wasn’t one to treat weird shit flippantly, so obviously his mind jumped to the worst. _It’s back and I’m standing in a Walmart buying half-price candy._ As if life couldn’t cut him some slack for two fucking minutes.

A rational part of him, small and undernourished, argued that he could be jumping to conclusions. Maybe this was what his court-mandated therapist meant when she said he had a tendency to catastrophize his own totally mundane circumstances. This could be how the Richies of the world processed - or failed to process - the inalienable concept of death. Perhaps the mountain really was just a molehill.

 _And maybe I_ didn’t _fight a monster clown before my balls dropped_ , Richie thought grimly, tossing a pack of Twizzlers in his cart. With the life Richie had forgotten, he was entitled to be a little paranoid.

He’d need to call Mike, of course. If anyone knew what to do with crazy recurring dreams about dead people, it was Mike. Except the idea of picking up the phone and reaching across state lines felt like an intrusion on the fragile peace Mike had started to cultivate after Derry. If It was really back, would he want to know? Hadn’t he martyred enough of himself?

Guilt wasn’t something Richie had ever paid much attention to, but the image of Mike, treading water in the Quarry and washing his hands of a life he never asked for, refused to be ignored.

What was kinder? Pretending everything was fine, or acknowledging that it wasn’t?

Shit, this is why Richie didn’t go to those follow-up sessions with Dr Stewart. 

He grabbed a bag of Hershey’s kisses and told himself to stop being a pussy. _You’re exhausted_ , he said to all the parts of him that were stumbling around in the dark, blind and hysterical, _and grieving, which fucking sucks, but that’s it. This is what’s real_. _Not It, not Eddie, not Stan_. _This._

Making his way systematically through the store, that promise on repeat in his head, Richie had almost convinced himself that everything _would_ be fine. He picked up a duffle to hold his new clothes and a travel pack of toiletries, plus anything that caught his attention for more than two seconds - sue him, he had impulse problems. Besides, he’d always wanted a NERF gun. 

The teenager at the checkout either didn’t recognise him or didn’t give a shit about Emmy-nominated comedians turning up at their workplace at the ass-crack of dawn on a Saturday. It was as unnerving as it was a relief; Richie had been waiting for the inevitable, the sudden light in a stranger’s eyes when they figured out why he looked so familiar, but it didn’t come. He must have been living in L.A. for too long.

The Uber he got back to the hotel was equally as nondescript, the driver treating Richie like every other passenger: that is to say, they didn’t say a single word to him for the entirety of the trip. He was beginning to think he just didn’t have an audience in Philadelphia when his phone vibrated in his pocket. It was another message from Bill, asking him whether he got his first text. Richie was typing out a perfunctory reply - _still on the east coast, about to leave_ \- when he was overcome with a wave of lethargy, numbing the tips of his thumbs where they had stilled above the keyboard. The idea of explaining what was happening felt like an insurmountable task; it asked too much of what little he had to offer.

He erased the message, slipped his phone back into his pocket and let his eyes close. He was just...tired. The gentle motion of the car was lulling him into a half-sleep, flashes of downtown Philly blurring through the window into a soft grey-white-black static. The only thing he could hold onto was the radio, a quiet and unintelligible murmur that ebbed and flowed like a steady tide.

Richie was teetering on the edge of unconsciousness when one voice rose above the hum. “Are you going to tell him?” 

It was a woman, her tone careful. She was met with a long silence, the background chatter wilting until she was the only one left. “Eddie,” she said, firmer this time, and Richie jerked upright. _No way_. No fucking way -

“Turn that up,” he demanded, scrambling across the backseat to the driver - except they weren’t there, not really. They were faded at the edges, their eyes dead on a road that Richie realised he couldn’t focus on either. Everything had this slippery quality to it, indistinct and muted, and the harder Richie tried to hold on to the details, the weaker it became. 

He sat back, chest heaving, as another voice rang clearly from his left. “Not now,” Eddie murmured. There was a scuffing sound, like plastic against linoleum, and the woman - Beverly, of course it was Bev - sighed.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it, but -”

“Yeah, you’re right - I don’t want to talk about it,” Eddie interrupted. He sounded worn and scratchy, and Richie could picture the edges of his mouth turning down with exhaustion. "Bev, I love you, but please. Not now.”

But Beverly wasn’t cowed; she never was. Richie could almost picture the muscle jumping in her jaw as she clenched her teeth. “I think it would help,” she said, a little louder, “if you did. You could do it now, if you wanted.”

Eddie snorted. “Yeah, sure. As if he’s going to hear me.”

Richie swallowed stiffly. “I can, Eds,” he croaked, gripping the seat beneath him so tightly his fingers began to numb. He shook his head, trying to clear the fog that had settled over his body, but he couldn’t dislodge it. Something - _someone_ \- was stopping him from thinking clearly. “Shit,” he slurred, falling back against the seat, “Eddie -”

“He can,” Beverly said, a thousand miles away and right beside him. “You know he can.”

Eddie’s voice came closer, tickling the hairs at the base of Richie’s neck. “What am I going to say? Oh, hey, Richie, surprise! I love you! Wake up and tell me you love me too, because I don’t think I’d ever be able to look you in the eye again if I said that and you weren’t.”

“No,” Richie choked, cold dread metastasizing out his lungs and through every nerve in his body. It was like being dumped in ice again and again, trying to catch his breath and opening his mouth to water every time. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t fucking breathe.

“Not quite like that,” Bev said calmly, “but it’s better than nothing.”

And Eddie - Eddie _scoffed_ , like they were just chatting over coffee, like Richie wasn’t in a car going nowhere with a dead man in his ear. He pried his fingers away from the seat and tried to open the door but it wouldn’t budge; the handle slipped through his hand like mist, a projection he couldn’t touch. A horrible, desperate sound was ripped from his mouth, a frustrated scream when the door began to melt away from him. The driver was gone, the road too - Richie was floating in the grey, boundless and paralysed. All that was left was Eddie and Bev, twin spectres, as incandescent as the sun and equally as unreachable.

If this was death, Richie was _this close_ to demanding a refund.

“I don’t know, Bev,” Eddie said, the fight draining from his voice. He was sinking back into the exhaustion from earlier, timbre dulled and defeated. Richie flinched when something warm landed on his head, but calmed when he realised - without sight, without hearing, knowing by feeling alone - that it was Eddie’s hand combing through his hair. It should be terrifying, being touched by a ghost, but on the scale of weird shit that had been happening to Richie as of late, this barely rated. Instead he sunk into the feeling, the gentle scratch of short fingernails against his scalp, and wished it would last. Just this once, he wanted the good stuff to stick around.

A second hand came to rest on his crown, smaller and softer. “You’ll figure it out,” Bev whispered, thumb rising over the crest of his forehead. He leaned into the touch, heart beginning to slow, and thought that maybe he wouldn’t mind being dead, if this is what it was. “You always do.”

Eddie made a low sound. “But what if I don’t, and he’s…” he trailed off, uncertain.

“He’s going to wake up, Eddie,” Bev said. There wasn’t even a trace of doubt colouring her words - if Beverly Marsh said something would happen, it would happen. Richie was briefly comforted by her confidence until he realised exactly what she said.

His eyes shot open. The Uber pulled up at the hotel and his driver was mumbling a cursory goodbye and Richie was in Philadelphia, Beverly was in Chicago, and Eddie was _dead_. 

He gave the driver five stars and had a panic attack in the elevator.

* * *

During his short but highly entertaining stint at college, Richie had taken a course in classical theatre taught by a Juilliard graduate. He found it altogether too stuffy and boring but there were gems hidden in the fluff, little tricks that Richie held onto long after dropping out. Like, who needed therapy when you had the Alexander technique?

He remembered the teacher’s footsteps clicking away from him as he lay on the floor, knees bent and spine flat. “Breathe from your stomach,” she said with the air of someone who paid far too much money to be taught how to breathe. Richie had smirked, about to crack a joke about usually breathing from his mouth when she added, “Keeping track of yourself is the key. When you move, you disturb the space around you. Think about how you’re going to disturb it _meaningfully_.”

Collapsed on his hotel bed, Richie wasn’t sure if this counted as disturbing the space meaningfully. At least he was breathing, though, in and out like a Goddamn champion.

He hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on when he entered, and despite the midday sun his room was dim and cold. The only sound aside from his wobbly breathing was the air conditioning, going through its cycle without concern for Richie’s presence. It kept working as it should whether or not he was here to fuck up the median temperature of the room. He was totally insignificant, in the scheme of things.

The briefest of images came to mind: a crumpled missing poster suspended in a spider’s web, his own face smiling down at him in sepia tones. _What are you afraid of, Richie?_

 _Being forgotten_ , Richie thought, _by everyone, but mostly by you_.

Christ, that was too depressing, even for him. He needed a fucking drink.

* * *

Yelp recommended seven bars in a mile radius, two that moonlighted as strip joints. Richie expanded his range to five miles and walked to the one with the lowest star rating.

If Richie was good at anything, it was drinking. Several people told him it was a problem and Richie was inclined to agree, but there were certain times - certain desperate times, like being haunted by the love of your life - that he felt throwing himself off the deep end was justified.

He found a dive bar in Queen Village stuck between a second-hand bookshop and a vape store. There was no sign out the front and a line stretching down South 6th Street, but a handful of twenties shoved into the bouncer’s fist got him in easily. From there, it was just a matter of snagging a free seat at the bar and ordering his first round.

Richie was halfway through his third vodka cranberry when someone tapped his shoulder. The music was barely loud enough to qualify this place as a real club but the drunk man behind him still shouted in his ear, “Hey, are you Richie Tozier?”

Smiling loosely, he swung around on his stool and tipped his glass at him. “Could be,” Richie replied, sizing the man up. He was in his early twenties, maybe twenty-five in a pinch, and the way he leaned into Richie’s space belatedly informed him that he’d stepped foot in a gay bar. A muted flash of panic flared in his gut - _shit, fuck, Steve’s going to kill me_ \- but it was soothed by the easy grin the stranger shot his way. The tension in Richie’s frame dissolved like sugar in water. _Fuck it_ , he thought, and downed the last of his drink. “Who’s asking?”

“Tyler,” he replied, absently hailing the bartender. “Two shots of tequila for me and my buddy,” he told her, slinging an arm over Richie with a practiced ease. Richie fought the urge to shrug it off.

“Well, I’m not gonna say no to free drinks,” Richie said, grabbing the shot glass when it was placed before him. “ _Salud_.”

“Right back ‘atcha,” Tyler grinned. He threw back the shot, taking his time to chase the last drops of liquor, the long line of his throat highlighted in the brilliant red light of the Budweiser sign hung over the bar. Richie downed his own shot with a practiced twist of his wrist and took the opportunity to stare openly.

Tyler was every spank-bank fantasy come to life in a single twink. Richie would swear he’d seen those pouty lips on the cover of the Advocate at some point, but nothing about his features stood out so distinctively that he could recall exactly who he jerked off to. What Richie did notice, however, was just how young he was: tight skin, dazzling eyes, Lynx Africa practically dripping from his tank top. Everything Richie wasn’t. 

“So, you in town for a show or something?” Tyler asked, wedging himself between Richie and the disgruntled woman sitting in the stool beside him. Richie laughed.

“Nah, man.” He paused - why _was_ he here? He could have left at any point, rental car or no rental car. The abrupt realisation that there really was nothing mooring him here, or anywhere, sent another burst of laughter to his lips. “Just seeing the sights, I guess.”

“Yeah?” Tyler bent closer, barely a hairsbreadth from Richie’s mouth. “You wanna get out of here for a personal tour?”

This was, without a doubt, the worst thing Richie could have done. Of course he did it.

Tyler lived two blocks away. “My roommate is out for the night,” he promised, his hand on the small of Richie’s back as they stumbled through the Village. Richie tried to walk faster, an itch low in his gut, but Tyler kept pulling him back with a firm grip on his waist. It was possessive, almost, and just risky enough that Richie was half-hard by the time they reached Tyler’s apartment.

He trailed a hand down Tyler’s chest as they waited for the elevator. “You’re really fit,” he mumbled, fingertips dancing over the cleanest set of abs he’d ever seen. It should be impossible how photoshop-perfect this guy was. 

Tyler huffed and grabbed his hand. “I work out,” he said, bringing Richie’s fingers to his lips. He brought them into his mouth, tongue laving over the tips, and Richie’s head dropped against his shoulder with an embarrassing moan. “And you’re adorable,” he added as the elevator pinged. 

“‘M not adorable,” Richie grumbled. He followed Tyler into the elevator, dragging his feet like a child. 

“Cute, then.”

It must have been the two extra shots Tyler had ordered, but the half-sob slipped out of Richie’s mouth without a chance for him to hold it back. “Not cute,” he slurred, pressed against Tyler’s torso and clinging on for dear life as the elevator spun around him. 

“ _So_ cute,” Tyler murmured, hugging him tight. Richie groaned and shook his head, but the words were gone - whatever he wanted to say had stayed on the first floor, leaving nothing but a dizzy, unbearably turned on shell. He rutted against Tyler’s thigh, thankful for the friction of denim against denim.

They reached the ninth floor after what seemed like an age. Tyler supported most of his weight as they staggered to his apartment, the hand that was once cradling his back now pulling him upright by the armpit. He deposited Richie on the living room couch and kissed his brow, promising to be back in a moment once he’d cleaned up.

Richie’s head fell heavy against the backrest. He absently reached for his jeans and unbuttoned them with clumsy, slow fingers, still damp from Tyler’s attention. It could be the amount of tequila he’d knocked back, or the fact that he hadn’t been laid in nearly a year - whatever it was, something urgent and fierce was bubbling through his veins, desperate to be released. 

A soft chuckle rose from the doorway. “Getting started without me?”

“You’re too fuckin’ slow,” Richie blurted, still struggling with his pants. Tyler stalked across the room and battered his hand away, effortlessly flicking the last button out of its hole. He reached down to stroke Richie’s cock and smiled when he saw there was no obstruction from any underwear. 

“You always go commando?”

Richie didn’t even blush. “When I plan on getting fucked, yeah,” he said, and pushed up into Tyler’s hand. “Come on, just fucking -”

“Easy, tiger,” Tyler murmured. He straddled Richie’s hips and finally leaned over for a kiss, sloppy and rushed. Richie broke it off, panting.

“Blow me,” he breathed. It wasn’t a question.

A slow, sly grin took over Tyler’s face. He gave Richie’s cock one last squeeze before shimmying away, slipping down the couch and tugging the waist of Richie’s pants with him. He made a punched-out sound as Richie’s thick cock bounced against his soft stomach.

“Jesus, you didn’t say anything about this,” he said, teasing and accusatory. Richie couldn’t help the hysterical giggle that bubbled in his throat. He gave a little wriggle with his hips, drunk on the feeling of being seen, wanting nothing more than to stay laid out and worshipped forever. 

Tyler’s mouth was obscenely hot when he wrapped his lips around the tip of Richie’s cock. He took up a slow, punishing pace, hollowing out his cheeks to take more, and Richie buried his hands in his hair to pull him in closer. He hadn’t been sucked off in - God, he didn’t even know how long it had been, but he missed this. The intimacy, the rough exhale against his thigh, his cock brushing the threshold of someone’s lax, willing throat. Trust, in hands and mouths and not so many words.

Richie keened as Tyler finally swallowed his full length and hummed around the shaft. “Come on, Eds,” he whined, bucking his hips into the slick warmth, “so good, Eddie, please -”

And there was Eddie, kneeling by his feet and sucking his cock with the same concentrated pinch to his brow Richie had seen a thousand times before. His tongue lavished the underside of his shaft, slow and heavy, his eyes wide open and huge as he stared up at Richie. He pulled off with a slick pop, a long line of spittle dragging from his lips.

“Whatever you want, Rich,” Eddie said, one hand coming up to stroke the soft underside of Richie’s balls. He leaned back down to press a light kiss to Richie’s tip, smudging his Cupid’s bow with Richie’s precum. “Anything you want.”

Richie couldn’t breathe. His hands shook as he lifted them to cradle Eddie’s jaw, his thumb rubbing at the faint scar on his cheek. He looked so content, older than Richie had last seen him but more assured, comfortable. Eddie licked his lips, catching the streak of pearly white and smearing it over the full line of his mouth, and Richie had to slam his eyes shut before he came at the sight of that alone.

“Jesus, Eddie, I’m -”

Eddie let his head fall against Richie’s thigh. “It’s okay, Richie,” he said, and cupped Richie’s cock in a gentle fist. He started to jerk him off, hand slick with lube Richie hadn’t even noticed, and Richie thrusted instinctively in time with his movements. The universe had been whittled down to this, the slide of Eddie’s hand and the growing heat in Richie’s gut, building faster than Richie could keep track of. He was trembling at the seams, ready to fall apart completely, but he needed Eddie’s permission, needed that acknowledgement. He needed to be seen. 

Richie’s eyes snapped open. “Please,” he rasped, hips bucking, “please, Eddie, I need you.”

Eddie turned and pressed a sweet, chaste kiss to a cluster of freckles on Richie’s inner thigh. “Let go, baby,” he whispered, his voice cracked and brittle. “Come for me.”

Richie obeyed, his body awash in a light so bright it burned. In a single, spectacular moment he _understood_ ; it came in halted flashes, fragments of a zoetrope, a life he almost lived. It was messy and brilliant, left turns where he went straight, his wrong ends put right. There was Eddie, radiant, beautiful, holding his hand and refusing to let go. There were days stretched before them as boundless as the sea and as terrifying too, but Eddie was there and the deep waters didn’t seem all that daunting. Eddie was there and it was going to be okay.

Eddie was there, and all of a sudden, he wasn’t.

“You know,” Tyler said, pulling back, “I love a bit of roleplay, but I would’ve preferred it if you called me by my name.”

Richie laughed so hard he threw up, right then and there on Tyler’s immaculate shag pile rug.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: mentions of prescription drug abuse

So, Philadelphia was a bust. In Richie’s defense, that city had it out for him from the beginning.

He staggered out of Tyler’s apartment in the early hours of Saturday morning and made his way back to the hotel in a daze. He would say he was moving on autopilot, throwing his shit together and booking the next flight out of dodge, but even autopilot implied some level of forethought. It was like being a kid again, doing something and not knowing why, lost for words because he never knew them in the first place.

There was an American Airlines flight to Detroit leaving in two hours. Richie received the confirmation email before he even reached his room. 

Philly International was still and subdued when he arrived; a red-eye had just touched down and the arrivals hall was bare save a few sleepy relatives. Richie hightailed it to departures, checking both his and Eddie’s bags and sequestering himself in a Starbucks while he waited. The sole employee ignored him and Richie wasn’t sure whether he was kind of offended or desperately glad that they didn’t recognise him. 

He was browsing Buzzfeed when his phone chimed - Bill, again. _Hey Richie, are you back in LA? I’ve got tickets for Angels v Yankees next…_

Richie swallowed past the lump of guilt in his throat and flicked the notification off his screen. The last thing he needed to do at that moment was talk Major League with Bill.

 _Eddie liked baseball_ , he remembered. Eddie played out the back of the Tracker’s truck depot when they were kids. Richie didn’t play; too long limbs and not enough hand-eye coordination, but he still hung around behind the cage and watched the sharp lines of Eddie’s back as he swung. He was methodical about it, patient, square-shouldered and squinting hard against the late August sunshine, and Richie could have stared at the back of his neck all day, if Eddie let him.

His flight was called for boarding before he could ask himself why Eddie never looked back. 

* * *

Richie had been to Detroit once before, back in 2013 when he was dropped from Comedy Central and tried to reignite his standup career. He’d spent most of the trip coked up and out of his mind, sleeping from sunrise to sunset and throwing himself at whatever caught his attention for more than two seconds. All he could really remember was the hard edge that lined the faces of the audience, the way they held their drinks close to their chest and rationed their bar snacks like Richie was going to jump down from the stage and wrestle the peanuts from their bare hands.

“They just filed for bankruptcy,” Steve had said, not looking up from his phone as they drove out to the airport. Richie snorted before he could stop himself.

“The whole city? Jesus Christ.” 

“I knew we should’ve cut the midwest leg to three shows,” Steve muttered, and fell silent. The air felt awkward and stilted until they boarded the jet and took off for New York; opulence, even of the L.A. frat boy variety, had felt far too conspicuous in Michigan. The longer he spent touring, the more his face appeared on billboards and Twitter ads and magazine covers, the lower Richie’s average schmuck mask slipped and threatened to fall to pieces in his lap.

Three years later and the city was largely the same, grey and somber but still vibrating with life beneath the surface. If Philadelphia had felt unwelcoming, Detroit was taking the silent treatment to a whole new level; Richie felt like he was walking through Midtown with a huge neon sign above his head that said, ‘stupid Hollywood jerk, free for a good shit-kicking’. He kept his head low and powered on towards the river, his breath coming in tight, anxious puffs. 

He bypassed the tourist traps along the shoreline, unsure of what he was looking for until he glanced up and caught sight of a small lighthouse jutting out of the marina. If he let his eyes drift, it almost looked like the old Portland Head lighthouse he used to visit with his grandmother every Memorial day as a kid. 

_Eddie came once_ , his dumb, incessant brain reminded him. They were seventeen and Eddie told his mom he was going to visit his aunt, and since Richie’s parents were already driving down to Portland that weekend, he might as well go with them, right? Needless to say, Eddie didn’t see his aunt; he spent the trip with Richie, wandering around the harbour for hours on end, throwing stones into the bay just to keep his hands busy. Even then there was an unspoken tension between them, something Richie was too afraid to give a name to. He knew if he looked up, met Eddie’s eyes, he’d say something he wouldn’t - and didn’t want to - take back.

They had arrived at the lighthouse by dusk. Eddie scrambled over the rocky outcrop and reached the summit before Richie; he stood, framed by the soft pink glow of the setting sun, and the answer to a question he’d been asking their entire lives fell on Richie in a brilliant, clarifying instant. _Oh, of course. I love him._

Richie looked out across the Detroit river, heart in his throat, and wondered if Eddie were here, whether he’d be brave enough to finally let himself be honest. Whether he could point to the scaled-down lighthouse and say, _hey, remember the spring of ‘93? That’s when I figured it out, but I think it’s always been there._ _I think I’ve loved you for longer than I’ve known how to do anything else._

Eddie Kaspbrak was in his lungs, his sinew, his marrow and his every nerve ending. Eddie had entered his life when they were in diapers and never really left, not in the way that counted, not until Neibolt the second time ‘round. Eddie was a part of him, despite everything, and Richie didn’t know what to do with all this love he still held in his chest, waiting for Eddie to come home. 

Richie doubled over, his knees hitting grass as he retched into the river’s edge. Nothing came up except hot, sour tears, blurring the shadow he cast in the dark water. All he could think of was Eddie crouched by his feet, eyes wide and trusting, telling him to let go; Eddie in his shirt flipping pancakes; Eddie bleeding in the passenger seat; Eddie’s voice, cracked down the middle, asking him to wake up. 

_I can’t keep doing this_ , Richie thought desperately, curling his fingers in the dirt. _I can’t._

But what was the alternative? He could call Mike, get to the bottom of this - and stop seeing Eddie, the last traces of him, the closest he was ever going to get to having Eddie in his life. It was stupid and selfish and made him want to tear his hair out, but this was it: a handful of recovered memories and his own imagination filling in the gaps. A phantom. A dream. The last pieces of Eddie he’d ever be able to hold on to. 

_It’s better than nothing_.

Even if it was Pennywise fucking with him one last time - he was so tired. Why try fighting when It obviously knew his weakest spots? Like getting caught in a bear trap; the more he struggled, the more it would hurt. At least this Eddie, as nightmarish and disconcerting as he was, looked at him the same way Richie looked at Eddie. 

He was ready to save himself once. Why was it so hard to convince himself he could do it again?

Richie pressed his forehead against the earth. _Because Eddie wouldn’t,_ he admitted, small and quiet and achingly real. _Eddie would keep fighting, even if it hurt. Even if he was scared._

Christ, was Richie scared. If It didn’t die when they thought it had, it meant dragging everything out of its shallow grave, messing with things that were finally starting to take root. It meant pulling Mike back to Derry, Bev and Ben from each other’s arms, Bill from his comfortable life.. The worst part was, they wouldn’t complain. They’d face death again and again and there wasn’t anything Richie could do to stop them other than keep this to himself like every other secret he’d ever buried under his skin.

A street lamp flickered to life nearby. Richie raised his head and sat back on his haunches, trembling. 

“I’m not afraid of you,” he lied to the water, to the lights across the channel. They flared briefly, so quick Richie wasn’t sure if he imagined it, brilliantly orange and pulsating. Something hot dripped from his nose and scuttled over his lips.

“I’m not,” he repeated through a mouthful of blood. “Keep fucking with me all you want, but I’m not scared.”

 _Try to take this from me. I dare you_.

A sharp, searing pain richoted from his skull down his spine and sent him falling to the ground again. His vision flooded with radiance; the shoreline melted into millions of grains of white sand trickling through an hourglass, every particle turning to luminous dust around him. Richie opened his mouth to scream but the air was thick with static, clogging his throat and trickling down his throat. He choked on the reverb, body convulsing, and his heart burst into furious applause against his ribcage. He felt electric, golden, bright and wild and divine - he felt more than human for an unending moment, suspended in something far greater than himself.

Richie didn’t know what death felt like, but this wasn’t it. This was more than death; this was more than anything his body was meant to contain, as fragile and soft as it was. This was more than his life, singular and small, more than his own two hands and the ground he clutched at. 

This was more than he could handle.

 _Take me back,_ he begged. There was a noise like a door banging in a hurricane: his pulse, frantic in his empty chest. _I can’t do this. Not yet. Give me more time to make it right._

He thought of Eddie, thirteen years old, his broken arm cradled against his sternum. Eddie was crying in breathless sobs and Richie’s hands didn’t wait for instruction; he reached over and twisted Eddie’s face away from the monster advancing on them, caught his eyes in terrified rapture.

 _Look at me_ , he said, stroking Eddie’s tear-stained cheek with his thumb. _I’ll fix this._

The house on Neibolt was crumbling around them. _I’ll fix this,_ Richie screamed at Eddie’s body as it was buried beneath tonnes of rubble and filth and fear. Someone was tugging at his arms, pulling him up, dragging him across the sunflowers and the dirt road and down to the quarry. Someone was pushing him over the cliff face and into the water.

He plunged into the deep and inhaled. Eddie’s lips were on his, breathing down his throat, bringing him back to life.

 _I’ll fix this_ , he breathed back, pressing everything he had into Eddie’s mouth. _I’ll come back for you._

Eddie leaned back and smiled. There was a trust in his eyes, naked and honest and true. He smiled and their bodies were filled with light as an unfamiliar voice shouted loud and clear through the expanse - _he’s crashing, he’s crashing, he’s going to -_

Fix this.

Richie was hauled to the surface, coughing and spluttering, his clothes drenched in river water. The lighthouse swung around and lit up the Canadian border. He was alone, shivering in the harbour, his legs like dead weights as he frantically tried to stay afloat. 

He swam to shore and collapsed against the bank. Then, in quiet, punched-out disbelief: “I need to get so fucking drunk right now.”

* * *

Bev left and didn’t return. Freshman year and the Denbroughs moved west. Stan got a scholarship in ‘92 and never replied to their letters. Mike was spending more time alone on the farm since his grandpa passed. Then Ben, barely a week after graduation, told them he’d been accepted into the University of Nebraska and that was it, really.

Eddie passed the joint back to Richie and stared up at the ceiling, tracing the old glow-in-the-dark stars he’d helped Richie stick there almost ten years prior. “Do you think it has something to do with the clown?” 

Richie inhaled slowly, savouring the musk. It wasn’t the best quality, but his usual dealer was out of town. _She’s not coming back_ , he admitted to himself grimly. “Maybe,” he said, blowing smoke through his nostrils aimlessly. He’d tried to teach Eddie how to make rings earlier; they both ended up coughing their lungs up, burning the last of Richie’s good stash down to a nub without taking a solid hit. They were careful now, letting the smoke blanket their tongues and slip down their throats, holding on just a moment longer than usual.

“I can’t remember, sometimes,” Eddie murmured. His eyes were unfocused still, and he didn’t notice Richie staring at the long line of his throat. “That summer. It’s -”

“Hazy,” Richie interjected. He took another hit, hands beginning to tremble at the background hum of memory building at the back of his mind. “Yeah, I know. It’s weird.”

Eddie made a frustrated noise and threw his hands up. “It’s more than weird, Rich, it’s…” he paused, lips pursed. Richie’s blood sang with the urge to lean over and kiss away the tense lines of his mouth, replace them with something soft and young. 

Instead he wordlessly offered the joint. Eddie took it but didn’t raise it to his lips; he sat and watched the smoke curl over his bent knees and out the propped window. A gentle breeze whispered through the neighbourhood and Eddie shivered, drawing inward. Lit only by the street lamps and the waning moon, he looked almost ethereal, gossamer-thin eyelashes fanning over his cheeks when he blinked slowly.

“I don’t want to forget this,” Eddie said carefully. He brought the joint to his mouth and breathed in. _Three, two, one_ \- and exhaled. “I don’t want to forget you.”

Sometimes Richie felt like his life was scripted, 12-point Courier New with perforated margins, each page ready to be ripped out and rearranged. There were standards for talking to anyone, especially Eddie - a constant allegra of skin-deep teasing, nothing that could hit bone. Nothing quite so real.

This was the last night they were going to be together before Richie left for California.

Fuck the script.

“I don’t want to forget you,” Richie echoed, quiet and sincere. Eddie stiffened.

“Richie -”

“Come with me,” Richie blurted. Eddie had turned to him, his thigh brushing against Richie’s, and for a blinding second he looked hopeful. Brave. “I can get you a ticket, and - and we can camp out together in my dorm.” He could picture it, beautiful and sprawling and entirely theirs: the undiscovered country, ocean as far as the eye could see, hand gripped in hand without a single flicker of doubt. 

_We could be happy,_ Richie thought, seeing the road map of their lives in painstaking detail. Here, their graduation, Eddie incandescent on stage holding his diploma, Richie dripping with pride. Here, the first apartment they rent together, leaky and old, home. Here, the soft, familiar way Richie kisses Eddie when he comes home from work, as ordinary as it is miraculous. Here, the future, spread out in its multitudes, the only constant being the lines of Eddie’s palm pressed firm and sure against his. Here, where life doesn’t stop being unfair, but they’re still happy.

Richie could see it so clearly he felt like he was thrust in the deep end when Eddie murmured a subdued and dejected, “No.”

“What?”

Eddie sighed and snuffed out the joint in the ashtray by his calf. “You know we can’t do that, Rich,” he said, and the paper house of Richie’s vision crumbled in on itself. No fiery explosion, no theatrics; just embers curling inward, a quiet defeat. Richie blinked rapidly against the burn threatening to crest in his eyes.

“Shit, yeah. You’re right.” He sniffed and pulled back from Eddie, gathering his knees close to his chest. “Forget about it.”

The beat of silence that followed was expected. What Richie didn’t anticipate was the hesitant touch on his elbow, Eddie’s body chasing the shape of his. 

“I won’t,” Eddie promised, squeezing Richie’s bicep. He sounded so earnest, so stubborn - the best parts of him, all the love and courage, the gentle and hard. Richie felt dizzy with it, intoxicated by Eddie’s skin and eyes and mouth, and he realised that this was it. Eddie was it for him. _Remember the lighthouse? Remember truth or dare in the clubhouse? Yeah, Eds, it was always you. Of course it was you._

Eddie smiled. It was the most mournful Richie had ever seen him. “I won’t forget you, Richie.”

“Not if I don’t forget you first,” Richie murmured. Eddie began to fade at the edges, particles of ash to the wind, and Richie looked back up to the hotel ceiling so he didn’t have to watch him disappear completely. He knew the shape where Eddie was supposed to be and never was so well, he could occupy it himself. 

He hadn’t gotten drunk. Richie had gone back to the Marriott off Jefferson avenue and taken some of Eddie’s Ambien, which he was starting to suspect wasn’t even Ambien at all, since it did fuck all for his sleep. He just lay on his bed all night, shoes and all, hypnotised by the off-white pattern on the walls, and attempted to figure out what the fuck he was supposed to do next. 

He conceded that Mike was out of the question. What, Richie was just going to pick up his phone and ruin his long-awaited trip to Florida like an asshole? 

He could practically hear Eddie’s snort. _You_ are _an asshole, though._

 _Not the point_ , Richie thought with a dismissive hand-wave, and wondered when he’d started talking to the projection of a dead man in his head. It was a step up from the dreams, he reasoned. 

So - no Mike, and Bill would just tell him to go to therapy. Ben and Bev were in Chicago, barely an hour’s flight away, but something painfully close to remorse twisted in Richie’s gut at the thought of disturbing them. He never used to give a shit about other people’s circumstances; Richie once called Steve to bail him out of a bar fight on the one day he’d taken off to attend his niece’s quinceañera. He even told his ghost-writer so she could write it into his next show; _my manager hates my guts because I’m a selfish prick, har-dee-har, let’s all laugh at the consequences of my very obvious cry for attention._ No wonder Huffpost called his last special pathetic. 

But before Richie could martyr himself completely, his phone buzzed on the bedside table. It was Beverly.

“H’lo?” Richie answered, scrubbing at his face. There was a crackling down the line and the soft click of a door shutting.

“Richie?”

“Ben?” He propped himself up against the backboard and winced against the sudden headrush. “Why do you have Bev’s phone? What’s going on?”

Ben sighed. “Listen, she doesn’t know I’m calling you.”

Richie frowned. “Then why -”

“You’re not picking up any calls from me,” Ben said bluntly. “And Bill said you haven’t talked to him either. I want -” another long exhale, tinged with frustration, “I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“Then why the fuck are you calling me from Bev’s phone?”

“Because you’ve always been closer to her than anyone else,” Ben said flatly. He didn’t sound like himself, something odd and melancholy colouring his voice, but Richie knew that despite everything, he was right. He and Ben - they were friends, obviously, but Richie would cry on Beverly’s shoulder before even telling Ben he was upset. Richie meant to be a better friend to Ben, talk to him more, sympathise with his canyon-sized crush on Bev, but - there was never the time, he supposed. A weak excuse now, but the best Richie could come up with at four in the morning.

“I’m okay, Benny,” Richie murmured, closing his eyes against the rush of nauseating guilt. “Sorry if I freaked you out. Seriously. I’m just -” _seeing Eddie in my dreams? Seeing_ Stan _in my dreams? Losing all touch with reality and trying to figure out what the fuck is happening to me?_ “- tired. I’m tired.”

“Right.” And abruptly, Ben sounded as exhausted as Richie felt. “I get that, Rich, I just - needed to hear you say it, I guess.” He paused. “Where are you?”

It took Richie a second to remember. “Oh, um. Detroit.” He chuckled weakly. “Felt like a road-trip, I guess. Hey, does it count as a road-trip if you fly? Because I drove from Derry to Philadelphia and then flew to Detroit, so it’s kind of a road-sky-trip? Is that a thing? That should be a thing. Like, who wants to spend -”

“Richie,” Ben interrupted, “can you come to Chicago?”

Richie’s overture on the Great American Roadtrip died on his tongue. “What? Why?”

“I need to head back to Omaha,” Ben explained, weary and drawn-out. The words came slowly, wearily, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted them to have breath. “There are a few things to tie up with the firm, stuff I can’t do remotely. It’s just for a few days, but - I don’t want Bev to be alone.”

A long beat of silence met his reluctant confession. 

“Richie? Are you still there?”

“Okay, first of all,” Richie said, ticking each statement off with his free hand, “Bev would legitimately kill you for implying that she needed, like, protection or whatever. Lucky for you, I know she doesn’t need protection, and what you’re really asking is for me to step up as the token comic relief and provide emotional support, which I’m great at since my own life has gone to shit and everyone else’s looks great in comparison. Secondly, what the fuck do you mean, tie up stuff with the firm? Are you abandoning your career for Bev? Because that’s crazy romantic and I hate you for making the rest of us look like fucking robots or something. Thirdly -”

“Breathe, Richie,” Ben said. “I’m not abandoning my firm. I’m relocating.”

Richie scoffed. “To Chicago, where Bev has built her whole life. You’re not slick, Haystack, you’re a total fucking sap. _Thirdly_ ,” he emphasised, drawing out the last syllable, “I’m gonna get so many miles this month, American Airlines is going to be paying _me_ to give them the privilege of hauling my ass all over the place - so, yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Ben huffed in disbelief. “For real?”

“Yes, Ben, I’m coming to Chicago!” Richie exclaimed. “Now go back to bed and cuddle your girlfriend like the stupidly hot Abercrombie couple you are. I’ll text you my flight details.” 

Ben thanked him and hung up. The entire exchange must have only lasted a handful of minutes, but Richie felt all the exhaustion and purpose of the last few weeks dispersing into the recycled air of the room. Even if Ben was acting a little weird, the culmination of days of wandering felt like a weight unburdened from his shoulders. Finally, he was _needed_. 

Christ, that sounded depressing. Maybe Huffpost was right.

The last tab open on Safari was his previous flight booking; a few taps and he was set to leave for O’Hare at nine. That left three hours of absolutely nothingness yawning before him. He could try and sleep, he supposed, or dig around Eddie’s bag for any other goodies he might have prescribed for himself. Richie was by the foot of his bed and unzipping Eddie’s bag before he could stop himself.

It should feel like an invasion of privacy, going through Eddie’s belongings and cherry-picking the opioids, but he had the strangest feeling this wasn’t Eddie at all. Sure, these were things Eddie had bought and packed and used - and there was nothing behind them, no hint of personality. _Maybe this_ is _who he was_ , a small voice pointed out. _Maybe you’ve spent so long apart that you don’t know him anymore_. 

Richie battered the concern away like an irritating fly. _I love him_ , he reminded it, a touch defensive. _I know him._

 _Loved_ , it snapped back. _Knew_.

He really needed to stop talking to himself. At least Bev would make him look slightly less insane on that front.

Eddie’s second toiletries bag - because of course he had two, one for general hygiene and another for being a paranoid little bitch - had already been scavenged by Richie. Apart from the Ambien there was a half-full bottle of Dramamine, a blister-pack of Zyrtec, some Lisinopril that was only dated a few days before Mike called. Richie imagined Eddie packing all of this, sweeping his arm through his medicine cabinet and shoving anything that fell into his bag. Maybe his brow was pinched; maybe he was laughing. Maybe his wife was there, begging him not to go; maybe he lied to her and snuck out in the middle of the night, vibrating with fear and exhilaration, starting his car with shaking fingers. 

Did he remember Richie, then? Did he drive up from New York wading through memories like Richie had, getting lost for hours at a time in the molasses of everything they’d forgotten? Was he thinking about Richie the same way Richie was thinking about him?

Richie uncovered an orange canister filled with innocuous white pills. He held them up to the dim light from his bedside table and squinted at the label: _Kaspbrak, Edward J._ _Take 1-2 tablets by mouth every 4-6 hours as needed for pain_. _Do not exceed 8 per day._ _Hydrocodone/APAP._

“Holy shit,” Richie breathed, “Eddie, you maniac.”

Ambien was one thing. Vicodin was throwing a stick of dynamite at a gas station and lighting a cigarette with the explosion.

And as if that wasn’t enough, when Richie tossed the bottle back into his duffle, it hit something thin and papery. He was momentarily confused, his mind sticky with conflicting information like a RAM drive from the late 70s being plugged into an iPhone, but soon enough the cobwebs were cleared. _Shit. The letter_. He hadn’t even thought about it since Vermont.

Richie had a very efficient system for dealing with things he didn’t like: he stuffed them down low in his chest, so deep they got stuck in his stomach and lay there like restless beasts, covered whatever distraction Richie could get his hands on. Liquor, drugs, food, sex - anything to keep it down. Anything to keep it satisfied with a half-life. 

The letter was down there, toe-to-toe with Richie’s complicated feelings towards his mother and the time he was hospitalised for accidentally mixing a fistful of Zannies and a _very_ nice bottle of Scotch. These were things Richie knew all too well; he knew their names, their faces, their valleys and arches and sharpest points. They were things he knew so well he kept them bound to his ribs and refused to let them float to his lungs, his throat, his lips. Terrible, honest things. The things that kept him from living a life he wanted so hard to believe he deserved. 

The letter would stay there, he decided, standing and making his way over to the bathroom. He freshened up, put on a new shirt, even shot the ghost in the mirror a small grin and some wobbly finger guns. He’d been doing this over forty years now; he had made his bed. 

If only he could learn to lie in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> see alex's art for this chapter [here!](https://imbadatshading.tumblr.com/post/621842764989169664/my-piece-for-reddiebang-s-2019-event-art-for)


	5. Chapter 5

There was a greasy spoon down the road from his hotel that opened at five and Richie was their very first customer, bouncing on the balls of his feet and immediately ordering the biggest, most caffeinated affront to humankind that they had on the menu. The girl who made it for him watched him wearily from behind the coffee machine, glancing up at him as she frantically typed on her phone. He briefly entertained the idea that she was live-tweeting his early morning escapade, maybe sliding into TMZ’s DMs to give them the latest scoop on the mountainous sundae that was Richie Tozier’s third consecutive public breakdown. 

Then again, he was just a scruffy man downing an extra large Americano and obsessively checking his own phone. She was probably worried he was a dealer scouting for new turf. 

Richie shot her a half-hearted grin. She didn’t return it.

He texted Ben his flight details, and started to draft a message to Bev - _hey, it’s me, don’t freak out when I crash at your place and steal all your Ding Dongs_ \- when he realised that he hadn’t replied to Bill yet. Richie had never been any good at being prompt; he had this persistent habit his whole life of saying he would do things later and then forgetting all about them. Bill would remember that, wouldn’t he? Hadn’t he been the one to poke Richie in the shoulder when he zoned off during class?

But even Richie had to admit this was different. This wasn’t getting lost in a daydream or focusing endlessly on the way the paint on the walls was beginning to peel; this was something Bill knew all too well, an infection long since turned inward. 

There were a few weeks after Georgie disappeared that Richie was convinced Bill was taken along with him. Bill was still _there_ , riding his bike down the hill with the usual reckless abandon, but there was an edge to it, like the corners of a scab: wary, rough-hewn. Dig a little deeper and the wound would weep. 

Richie wondered how obvious it was with him now, if Bill thought he’d been taken out by the body snatchers and turned into a perpendicular version of himself. It would explain a lot, admittedly. Something had carved out Richie Tozier and stuffed the shell with a stranger, and he felt fine.

The numb, distant feeling was familiar. It didn’t hurt; the opposite, really. His hands weren’t his own, nor the flesh and bone beneath, but that was okay. He hadn’t known who he really was for twenty-seven years, and he was starting to suspect that the kid who tracked the leylines of the sewers had long since disappeared with the other missing children. All he’d left for the world to remember him by was a long, soft whine; the far-off call of wanting. Richie couldn’t shut it up if he tried.

He pulled up iMessage and tapped out a slow, jolting reply. _Got caught up in Detroit. Not sure when I’ll be back in Tinseltown. Say hi to your mom for me._

It read like a crude impression of Richie, a caricature, but he pressed send anyway. The boy still haunting Neibolt let the baseball bat slip from his fingers and clatter against the cavern floor.

Richie gathered his bags and gave the barista one last tight smile, the kind an ex once told him made him look like a muppet. The light outside had barely touched the tops of buildings, unseasonably grey and tentative, the first fall of dust on something newly abandoned. It felt like an intrusion, walking between buildings like the alleyways between gravestones, following the pavement wherever its lines bled - past his hotel, beyond the overpass, through Greektown and its cousins. No one stopped him; in fact, there was no one on the streets at all. Richie wandered through a snapshot of Detroit, crystalline, barely indistinguishable from the dozens of cities he’d pressed himself against like prying fingers to a fresh bruise.

He tried to imagine himself staying here. Setting down roots, nestling between the townhouses, prodding at the ache until it burst - a new life, not necessarily better, but closer to the truth. He imagined himself staying in Chicago with Bev and Ben, a perpetual third-wheel, squirrelled away in their ADU dialling and redialling Eddie’s phone until AT&T disconnected the number. Or he could drift south, through the Carolinas to land in the clammy hands of Miami. West, maybe, from the Great Lakes to the Rockies and every Kerouac wet dream in between. A real American road trip, the kind he used to plan with Eddie late in the summer, shoulder-to-shoulder as the sun yawned languidly across the quarry. 

He tried to imagine Eddie in the driver’s seat, hands ten-to-two, eyes fixed to the open road. _Where to next?_ Richie would prop his feet against the dashboard and stare at Eddie’s profile outlined in pure Atlantic blue. _We’ll go to Chicago_ , Eddie would say, soft and sure as the horizon. _I’ll take you there._

His feet led him to a nondescript building on the corner of an intersection. Richie wasn’t sure why he’d stopped until he spotted a small, unassuming plaque by the doors: _Central Synagogue, est. 1943_. The same year his mom’s dad was discharged from the Navy by heading up to Vancouver; the same year he met a shop girl who could keep up with his motormouth and didn’t mind a husband who looked at men as much as she did. _Huh. Weird coincidence_ , Richie mused, and he had the feeling that Grandpa Roy, of blessed memory, was reaching through the years to smack him on the underside of his head. _Mags, how did a girl like you raise a schmuck like him?_

 _Easy, pops,_ Richie thought as he pushed open the door. _I never got my dick cut off_. 

Richie hadn’t visited many synagogues in his time; there was one on the corner of Broadway and 18th that he’d lingered outside of when he received the news that his mother had passed, but he didn’t dare enter the shtiebel. His standards consisted of the handful of times he’d peeked in on Derry’s modest temple and the pictures painted by the other poor Larry David-wannabes at the Laugh Factory every Saturday night. They had always sounded slightly resentful, complaining at length about the length of the Torah readings or the unofficial ban on pagers that had stretched through the nineties. Stepping past the eaves, Richie wondered if the quiet unease prickling the hairs on his neck would exist if his mom had taken him to shul as a kid, or if he was ever meant to be in a place of so much stillness at all.

Despite being hundreds of miles away, this temple bore the same scaffolding of Derry’s synagogue; timber benches reverberating from the bimah like shockwaves, the universe narrowed to the empty lectern. Echoes of Federal style were propped into the off-white pillars, cast in soft yellow light by the multitude of candelabras spotted across the sanctuary. Even the floorboards, worn smooth by generations of shuffling feet, felt brittle in the same way that Derry’s had. Everything had a sepia-toned quality, like a polaroid left to bleach in the sun; forcibly old, a relic from birth. 

Richie approached the sanctuary lamp, hands stuffed in his pockets. Strung before the ark, its electric light sturdy and unwavering, he waited for it to illuminate something in his body, to reach out and cradle the parts of himself lost to the fog. _Here you are_ , _Richie_ , he waited for it to say, _it’s been here all along_. _Do you understand, now?_

But the lamp was just a lamp; the ark just a cabinet; the bimah just a platform. The space was reverent, a hand held over a flame to protect it from the wind - but he wasn’t warmed by its heat. _This is not yours_ , it said, without cruelty or hostility. Just a statement, plain and simple as words on a page. _Not the way you want it to be_.

A wave of shame swept over Richie’s brow and sent him stepping back from the ark. It was a stupid idea, coming here and - what, praying? Sitting shiva? Acting like he was something he wasn’t? Richie was good at pretending, built an entire career from the bricks and mortar of half-truths, but the space around him demanded a level of honesty he wasn’t sure he was capable of possessing. 

He spun on his heel, cheeks burning, and collided with someone’s chest.

“Shit, sorry,” Richie spluttered, pushing back. “The door was open, I just -”

“It’s alright,” the man said gently. Clearly the world was short on ideas for rabbis, because this one looked like Stan’s dad refracted through a prism; same dark hair, same square jaw, same crocheted kippah pinned to his skull. The only difference was his smile, as demure and unassuming as Ben’s; a reassuring flash of teeth that knocked politely against the foundations of Richie’s suspicions and asked, ever-so-kind, if he’d like to have a chat. “You’re a bit early for the service.”

“What?”

The rabbi tilted his head. “Shabbat,” he said slowly, “but I’m guessing you’re not here for that.”

Richie swallowed. “Uh, no. I’m just…” He trailed off, staring at the rabbi’s patient gaze. “Sorry, do I know you?”

“I don’t think so,” he replied, genial and mild. Richie got the impression he could pester this man with a thousand questions and he’d answer every single one of them as thoroughly and kindly as the first. He extended his hand to Richie. “Rabbi Avery, but call me Joe. Everyone does.”

A startled bubble of laughter left Richie’s lips. “No fucking way,” he crowed, grabbing Avery’s hand, “my mom’s maiden name was Avery. Talk about the fuckin’ chances.” He paused. “Wait, am I allowed to swear in here? My friend Stan did at his bar mitzvah but that kind of a special case, and his dad chewed him out afterwards. Something about the sanctity of tradition or whatever.”

Rabbi Avery shrugged. “This is a Reform synagogue, Richie. Almost anything goes.”

Richie laughed again. “Holy shit, man, this place is great. Y’know, my grandpa used to talk shit about you guys all the time.” He lowered his voice to an approximation of his grandfather’s smoke-roughened New Jersey accent. “ _They’re not Jews, they’re fuckin’ yuppies trying to reinvent the wheel_.” 

It sounded flat to his own ears, but Avery cracked a grin. “He sure sounds like a character.”

“Oh yeah, big time. Grandpa Roy was bitching right up ‘til the end, the old bastard.”

“Did he pass recently?”

“Oh.” Richie looked down at his sneakers. “Uh, no. He died when I was a kid. Barely even knew him, to be honest. He and my mom had a, um, weird relationship. She wasn’t really Jewish, not like he wanted her to be, and neither am I.” He bit his tongue before the whole story came tumbling out. _What the fuck is wrong with you?_ he hissed at himself. _He’s a rabbi, not a fucking therapist_. 

Except Avery didn’t push the matter; he hummed, non-committal, and leant against the back of a nearby bench. “Is that why you’re here?” he asked. Richie glanced up and studied his casual posture, the open stretch of his shoulders. The sincerity that lived there, plain and simple. The absence of fear.

“No,” he said quickly. “Well, yes, but no. I don’t know, I should probably just leave.” Richie stepped backwards, face burning. “It was a mistake, I’m sorry, I’ll just -” he gestured towards the door with a hand that felt larger and more clumsy than it ever had. His legs ached to move, to sprint out the door and return to a world he understood. Maybe his mom was right not to bring him here, exposing his small-town crevices to the frank, unbound expanse. It felt like he had been touched by something fundamentally unhuman, so far removed from any good that existed in the world that there wasn’t any space left in his body for the light to shine through. Maybe Derry wasn’t even the reason he was like this at all; maybe Richie was always meant to live on the outside, hand pressed against the glass in the hopes that someday, someone inside my look his way. 

“Why are you here, Richie?”

He froze by the entrance. 

Richie told his mom he was gay two days before she died. She’d finished her third round of chemo and told Richie under no uncertain terms was she about to claw her way through a fourth; the exhaustion writ onto her thin arms and the bags under her eyes was enough to force Richie to agree. If it came back, it came back; if it took her, it took her. It was 2004, midsummer, and he told her before he could stop the words from pushing past his lips.

Maggie Tozier was quiet for a long moment, propped up in her hospital bed in the knitted beanie Richie had bought from some cancer benefit in San Jose the week before. She was silent for so long Richie worried she was having a stroke, or the morphine haze was too thick to understand anything through, but then, in a bare murmur, “Why are you telling me, Dickie?”

He couldn’t remember what he said next; the afternoon was wrapped in gauze, blurred with rubbing alcohol, overshadowed by a sudden drop in blood pressure. Richie held his mothers’ hand while she slept, a confused little crease in her brow, and tried not to parse the questions she had been asking underneath: _why now? Why here? Why have you kept this buried under your tongue for so long like a secret everyone already knows?_

“Because I’m scared,” Richie said. There was no great light lifting him off the ground, no wave of revelation. He stared at his mothers’ heart monitor and Avery’s downturned eyes and saw sincerity not as they understood it, but as he did: fingers pressed a wrist with no pulse, an extinguished candle, a letter he couldn’t open because all of these things, separately and together, built a man Richie was too afraid to recognise. 

“We’re all scared,” Avery replied quietly, and Richie shook his head.

“No, you don’t get it, man; there’s shit going on that’s - that’s way more than this,” Richie babbled, backing further towards the doorway. His spine hit the frame and jostled something loose, like a chest kicked open after being clawed at for so many years. “And it’s not about religion, or death, or any bullshit like that - it’s just - it’s just _me_.” He inhaled shakily, the magnitude of the words in his throat leaving him breathless. “There’s something wrong with me, and it’s getting worse.”

And without an edge of unease or distrust for the stranger ranting in his synagogue, Avery walked across the floor and extended a hand. “We can figure it out,” he said simply, like they were discussing the weather. Richie snorted.

“Uh, yeah, no. Look, you’re a cool dude, but we just met and you already got a read on my weird issues with religion, so - thanks but no thanks.”

Avery raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t talking about you and me, Richie.” His hand remained open in the space between them, palm to the ceiling. If Richie reached out, would it hurt? Would Avery’s fingertips slice through his skin like broken glass? 

His own hand itched. It would be so easy to offer his wrist, his neck, his belly - the vulnerable parts that could be bled dry without effort. He was tired of curling in on himself, tired of waiting for the worst. 

He was tired of being afraid.

“I’ve gotta know,” Richie said, staring at the space between their bodies, “what’s the Jewish take on gays? Because I am. Gay. So, yeah.”

There was a beat of incredulous silence before Avery sighed. “Richie, if I had a problem with gay people, I think my husband would be the first to know.”

“Oh shit, a gay rabbi? This place has everything.” Richie laughed and the bubble broke, spectacularly fragile as he reached across the divide and took Avery’s hand. It was cooler than he expected, and firm; the hands of a surgeon, skilled in slicing through layers of callus and infection to touch the bare flesh beneath. He let Avery pull him into a hug, awkward at first due to his tallit and Richie’s uncoordinated limbs, and resisted the urge to smack his shoulder like they were two old friends catching up at a sports bar. 

It should have felt inappropriate at best, but there was something loose to the way Avery was holding him; the implicit suggestion that he could break away if he wanted to. And he _didn’t_ \- he felt okay, just for a moment, wrapping his arms around a random guy from Detroit who didn’t know him from the next schmuck. He felt so far removed from himself, but comfortably so, that it slipped out without him realising: “My best friend died.”

Avery didn’t respond for a long moment, so long Richie thought he hadn’t spoken at all. It was stupid, anyway; he shouldn’t have said anything. Except Avery was cradling the base of his skull and whispering, low and steady, in a language that tickled the very depths of Richie’s memory. 

Richie pulled back and squinted. “Um. Thank you?”

He squeezed the back of Richie’s neck, strong and reassuring. “I’m sorry to hear that, Richie.”

“Oh, uh. Yeah, that’s - thanks.” Richie averted his eyes. “I don’t know why I told you that.”

“Have you thought about how you’ve mourned?”

“Not really.”

Avery shot him an unimpressed look, uncannily channeling the exasperation his Grandpa Roy directed towards him when he tried to swing from the monkey bars by his ankles. “You need to grieve,” he said, like he was spelling it out to a very small child, “and part of that process is identifying how you’re going to do it.”

Richie blinked. “What, like shiva?”

“Shiva, maybe. There are ways to grieve that aren’t so formal.” Avery pulled back from Richie and fixed him with a kind yet critical eye. “Can I offer you some advice?”

He shrugged. “You’re the rabbi.”

“I don’t think you need to grieve for your friend,” Avery said, and he held up a hand to Richie’s gaping mouth and outraged expression. “Mourning is an intensely personal process, Richie, and it requires an understanding of yourself before you can understand what the way forward is. I think you need to grieve yourself first - the man you were, the man you are not. Do you know where the word ‘grief’ comes from?”

“Um, no?” Richie frowned, leaning away. “Listen, I have a flight in like an hour, I should -” 

“It comes from the Latin _gravare_ ,” Avery continued as if he hadn’t spoken. He released Richie from his grasp and turned back to the ark, speaking to the bimah as if it were listening to his every word. “ _To make heavy_. Grief is a heaviness, Richie, but I don’t think it’s other people. Not always. Sometimes it’s just us.”

Richie looked down at his hands, broad and unfettered. The scar that used to sweep his palm was gone, of course it was; but for a moment, as brief and exalting as a solar flare, he could see it again, the pale shine of new tissue against old. He’d lived with that scar for nearly three decades, never completely sure of where it came from. It was just one of the many pieces of flotsam that had come to shore on his skin: the vacancy in his arms, the crowded feeling between his ribs, the absence of another body folded against his own like a closed bracket. A circle, broken. 

_It wants to divide us,_ Beverly had said after Neibolt. Her hands had been shaking but her voice didn’t waver once. Richie remembered staring at her like she was the only real thing on that street once Eddie had been taken away. _We were all together when we hurt It._

He closed his fists. “What do I do?” he asked, the answer already souring in his mouth. 

Richie raised his head. Avery was gone and the temple was still, undisturbed and porcelain-fine, like he’d never been there at all. 

“Okay,” he said slowly to the silent expanse. “Right. Okay, yeah, that’s normal.” He stepped backwards, glancing around. No one - rather, nothing - stopped him. The space felt indifferent to his presence, a photograph in a book he never bothered to read. Not quite indifferent to him, not quite hostile either; inalienable, untouchable. _This is not yours._

He was hightailing it out of the building before it could ask him to leave. By the time he reached his hotel, he’d forgotten that he hadn’t told the rabbi his name. 

* * *

The flight from Detroit to Chicago passed in minutes, a sticky flow of boarding to flying to disembarking. Richie blamed it on the Tylenol he popped at Wayne County airport; something about the pills made him feel weird, like he’d fallen asleep and woken up not knowing what day it was. There was this strange exhaustion pulling at him the entire time he was in the air, a fatigue that he couldn’t shake off when he landed at O’Hare. Jet-lag, his mind provided. It had only been an hour-long flight but he grabbed the excuse by the reins, ready to ride that pony ‘till it collapsed beneath him.

Beverly wasn’t waiting for him in arrivals. He bristled for a hot, irrationally upset second before realising he hadn’t actually sent the text he wrote back in Detroit. _Get it together_ , he snapped at himself, tapping at his phone to find Bev’s number. It wouldn’t do him any good freaking out over his own shit when Bev had far bigger things to worry about.

“Hello?” 

“Who has two thumbs and no fucking clue where the cabstand is?”

There was a pause over the line. “I’m going to kill Ben,” Bev groaned. Richie cackled and hefted his bag over his shoulder, Eddie’s tucked in the crook of his elbow.

“Hey, before you go all Carrie on his ass, can you sneak a couple of shirtless pics? I need a new catfish look and his part-time stripper body is right on the money.”

“Right,” Beverly drawled, “like you haven’t pulled the Seth Rogen card on co-eds in the past.”

“Okay, first of all, I’m kind of offended that you put me and Seth Rogen in the same sentence. Secondly -”

“What are you doing here, Richie?”

Richie squinted up at the directions board. “What, can’t a pal hang out with a pal after being forcibly reminded of their repressed monster-related trauma?” A man walking past shot him a strange look, to which Richie replied with a sunny grin. Bev huffed something two shades away from a laugh and he could picture her lips twitching, trying not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her amused. 

“You know what I mean.” She was quiet for a second, long enough that Richie expected her to change the topic. Except, with a short inhale: “How are you? Really.”

Richie swallowed past the burgeoning lump in his throat. “Fine and dandy, Ms Marsh. I _do_ have this tingling sensation in my asshole -”

“Richie.”

“- that comes and goes, a lot like my ex-girlfriend -”

“Richie!”

“- but apart from that, it’s all cruisy in Tozey town.” He spotted an arrow pointing towards what he hoped was the universal sign for the exit and headed off, phone wedged between his ear and shoulder as he hitched his bag higher. Beverly sighed.

“Are you going to be like this the entire time you’re here?”

“Bevvie, it’s like you didn’t just suddenly remember me after twenty-something years of clown-guided amnesia. Now,” he said, picking up speed as he spotted a line of yellow cabs curling past the sliding doors, “Haystack gave me your address, so I expect you to roll out the welcome mat in about twenty minutes to an hour, depending on how much my cab driver hates me. And judging by the week I’ve had, I’ll get Hannibal fuckin’ Lecter if I’m lucky.” He peered out of the window. “Ah shit, there’s one Anthony Hopkins-looking motherfucker staring right at me. Well, it was nice knowing ya again, Beverly.”

A barely-suppressed snort of laughter filtered through the phone. It was like being thirteen again and making some gross fart joke that he’d meant for Eddie but turning around to find Bev’s face scrunched, her hand poised in front of her mouth to shade her toothy smile. They were the days where Richie could almost imagine a world where he loved Beverly Marsh the way he wished he could, loved her like all the other boys did. He could almost imagine marrying a girl like Beverly, if only girls like Bev could pretend to love boys like Richie.

“Rest in peace, Trashmouth,” Bev chuckled. A rush of affection filled Richie’s body, suffocating the cavernous quiet that had followed him from Detroit, from Philly, from Derry. He hadn’t realised how cold he’d felt the past week - the past twenty-seven _years_ \- and the warmth that suffused his bones was at once alien and familiar, like the first sip of coffee after a long sleep. He couldn’t help but laugh too, something loosening in his chest. 

“I’ll see you soon,” he promised, and added a few obnoxious kissing noises until she hung up with another burst of laughter. He stood there for a long moment, staring down at Bev’s contact information in his phone, the tiny, blurred picture she took of herself at the Orient. He’d been halfway to fully wasted that night when he noticed he didn’t have any of the Losers’ numbers; he tossed his phone at Eddie first, careful not to let their fingers touch, and got him to pass it ‘round the table. 

Eddie didn’t add a picture to his contact. Instead Richie had added one for him, a less-than-glamorous sneak shot of Eddie mid-rant, his hands flung to the edges of the frame like a conductor guiding his orchestra to a grand crescendo. He looked - not happy, not quite so clean-cut, but settled. His jagged lines had smoothed the longer the night went on, pieces of a boy he should have never left behind slotting into place and disrupting the sand on which Edward Kaspbrak was built. 

It should have been strange, disquieting even, how quickly Eddie came to rest on his new shores, but Richie couldn’t tear his eyes away. If anything, the confidence that sunk into his shoulders with every passing minute felt like a portrait straightened, a book placed back on the shelf, a key snug in its lock: things put right. Eddie had looked like himself again, teeth flashing in the low light, and Richie couldn’t help but wonder how he’d ever forgotten loving someone like this, wholly and completely. He was in the restaurant; he was at the lighthouse; he was standing in terminal one with his heart in his throat, wondering how he was supposed to live with all that love when it had nowhere to go. 

Eddie wasn’t coming home. 

Eddie wasn’t coming home because there hadn’t been a home between the two of them, not for a long time, and that meant everything Richie felt - the horrible thing with sharp edges and a bleeding centre - was adrift too. He could wait, shine a light out on the squall for as long as he lived, but Eddie wasn’t going to shine back. No matter what he dreamed, no matter how insistent the pull in his chest was towards hope, no matter how many gods he pled to and bartered with: Eddie wasn’t coming home. He couldn’t hold on to hope forever.

Richie slipped his phone back into his pocket. He squared his shoulders, rubbed at his cheeks with the back of his hand, and stepped out of the terminal into the cold Chicago morning.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: references to past domestic abuse

Beverly’s temporary townhouse in Wicker Park was so charmingly nondescript Richie almost walked past it, lost in the lines upon lines of wrought iron gates and trickling ivy. The Chicago he knew from a handful of tours was a little grimy, lips pulled back in distaste, a bark louder than its bite - but here, he almost felt like he was back in Maine, skirting through the tidy provincial suburbs of Bar Harbor. The upturned nose of New England had snubbed the urban centre of Illinois and graciously left its laurels to rest off North Damen avenue, tucked between two mid-century churches and a spattering of off-white boutiques. 

It was the kind of place that told Richie he should settle down, put on a suit and tie, work an honest job to provide for his wife and their two-point-five kids. He snorted and pushed open the gate, trying not to look as blatantly out of place as he felt.

He jabbed at the buzzer a few times and leaned against the outer wall as he waited. The house overlooked the titular park, evergreen despite the bite of fall blowing in from the north, and he watched as two men ambled down the footpath. Belatedly, and with a sticky flush of embarrassment, Richie noticed they were holding hands, the taller of the two looking down at his partner through laugh-creased eyes. The smaller man was gesticulating wildly, his voice inarticulate to Richie, but he could hear the dips and heights of his timbre working towards a true diatribe. 

They rounded the corner and disappeared. The man’s voice dissolved into the midday traffic and Richie shook his head, forcibly derailing the path his thoughts wanted desperately to get lost in.

Thankfully the jangle of a lock pulled him out of his head and within seconds Beverly’s broad grin filled his vision. She flung herself at him, arms tight around his shoulders, and buried her face in his neck.

“Hey you,” Richie laughed, dropping his bags to hug back. Bev squeezed him closer and the crown of her head tickled Richie’s nose when he ducked down to press a kiss to her hairline. “I thought I said red carpet.”

She huffed against his clavicle. “You get the red carpet treatment when you get me backstage with Graham Norton.”

“Graham Norton? Seriously?” Richie sighed. “Beverly, you disappoint me. Of all the gay comedians, you pick the one across the pond when there’s a perfect good one right in front of you.”

He paused for the volley to his serve. But Bev had pulled back, her eyes wide. “Richie?”

Oh, _right_.

“Ah, shit,” he groaned, smacking his forehead with his palm, “not again.”

It took half an hour and a pot of strong coffee to explain to Beverly that he wasn’t joking when he said he was gay. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him, exactly; there was just an inherent irony that lined everything Richie said, a bitter aftertaste in his own mouth that slipped the ears of others. A small ‘just kidding, unless you want to’ that he ended up sprinkling on his entire depressing life.

Beverly set down her mug and grasped his hand across the table. They were tucked away in the breakfast nook of a small, cosy kitchen with a distinct lived-in vibe that didn’t quite match the awkward hunch to Bev’s shoulders. When he prodded, she told him it was an Airbnb owned by a friend who lent it to her while the divorce was finalised. “It’s not like I could go home,” she had said, shrugging like Richie wasn’t two seconds away from tracking down Tom Rogan and giving him as good as he gave her. An eye for an eye for an eye - the least he could give back to a world that still held a grudge against them both.

“I’m really proud of you, you know,” Bev said. Her thumb traced over his knuckles, rhythmic and slow. Richie’s lips quirked.

“You’re proud of a forty-year-old wash-up finally admitting he likes dick?”

She shot him a hard look. “I’m proud of my friend for dealing with all the bullshit life has thrown at him and coming out the other end. Literally.” 

Richie choked on his coffee. Beverly smiled at him, sweet as honey and twice as beguiling.

“Besides, I always knew.”

“How the fuck did you know?” 

“You’re not as good an actor as you think you are,” she replied simply, withdrawing her hand to take a sip of her coffee. Richie gaped at her, lost for words.

“But - no, I was - I lost my virginity to Cissy Clark! Bill walked in on us, junior year! I was the - the _pinnacle_ of heterosexuality, Beverly!”

Bev threw her head back, cackling. “Bill walked in on you fucking Cissy Clark?”

“It was more of a handjob, but the point remains!” Richie hit the table with his index finger with every passing word. “I - was - _so_ \- straight. And you left before freshman year anyway, what the fuck would you know?”

“I had eyes, Richie,” she said dryly. He was struck then, suddenly and without preamble, with the enormity of his love for Beverly: for the wicked curve of her lips, for the callouses on her thumbs, for the brilliant corona of her hair pulled back with an old, threadbare hairband. It felt right to be there, legs tangled together beneath the table, simple in a way few things were.

He threw back the dregs of his coffee and patted her wrist. “Except when it came to Ben,” he reminded her, because loving her didn’t mean he couldn’t take a golden opportunity to dunk on her love life.

“Okay, _you_ shut up,” she protested and kicked him in the shin. The smarting sting couldn’t erase the dumb, broad grin spreading across Richie’s face. “I was a kid, alright? Besides, it’s not like -” 

Her mouth shut with an audible click.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Beverly blurted, a faint blush staining her cheeks. “It’s nothing.” She stood abruptly and made for the hallway, calling out over her shoulder, “Come on, I’ll show you your room.”

On the list of weird shit that had happened in the past three weeks, Beverly’s terrible attempts to dodge the question were pretty low priority. It was still disquieting, tugging at the edges of a relationship he’d only just remembered how to be a part of, and he followed her with his shoulder tensed. He wanted to stop her, dig deeper, shake the words hiding between the folds of her sweater - but the thought alone was exhausting. Jet-lag again, he told himself, but the more he used the excuse the less sense it made.

Beverly grabbed his bags on the way and dumped them on what was apparently his bed. It was plain and homely, decorated sparsely but with enough personal touch that Richie didn’t feel like he’d stepped into yet another hotel room. 

“What did you pack these with, cinder blocks?” 

Richie threw himself at the mattress, disturbing the comforter as he bounced on the springs. “Nah. I’ve got a NERF gun, though.”

“How the fuck did you get a NERF gun through airport security?”

“I don’t know, Bev, I’m a white dude with a verified Twitter account.” He shrugged. “I could commit actual murder and people would say I’m just misunderstood.”

Beverly rolled her eyes. “You did commit actual murder.”

“Clowns don’t count.”

“So Bowers just rammed his own head into that axe.”

Richie clicked his fingers and pointed at her. “Exactly. That’s why you’re my fall guy. Fall gal? Is that sexist?”

“You did an entire set making fun of your girlfriend’s wide-set vagina,” Beverly reminded him. “You’re already sexist.”

“I didn’t write that!”

“You still said it!” She kicked him in the shin again - that was _definitely_ going to bruise. “If anything, _you’re_ the fall guy.”

“Actually, neither of us is the fall guy,” Richie pointed out, “since the police had like, zero follow-up questions about a bunch of celebrities and their weird librarian friend showing up covered in blood and sewerage and shit.” He grabbed one of the decorative pillows littering the bed and propped it under his chin. “What was up with that?” he wondered.

Beverly took a seat beside him, smile strained. “Mike knew people,” she said quietly, fiddling with the loose tassel on Richie’s pillow. The corner of her mouth turned down, levity abandoned with a long, heavy exhale. “And we all gave statements after - you know.”

Richie frowned. “After what?”

“Richie,” Bev said, her voice pained, “please. You know.”

“No, I really don't.” Richie twisted, his knee pressed against Bev’s thigh as he searched her face. “After what?”

“After the funeral,” murmured Bev. Richie’s heart lurched to his throat and then slowly sank into the floor, seeping into the fibres in the carpet. He wanted to crawl underneath it, cover himself in sinew and polyester, wait until Beverly forgot he’d ever spoken. _Jesus, the fucking funeral_.

“Oh.” He glanced down at her hands - skittish, trembling. “That.”

Bev didn’t reply. There was something tangible in the air between them, thick and syrupy, suffocating the already small room. He remembered her at the funeral, her body curled against Ben’s as she stared blankly at the coffin; he remembered being angry for a brief, terrible instant, wanting nothing more than to throw open the casket and wind around the space Eddie was supposed to occupy. It was jealousy, he recognised later, hot and poisonous, a weight he never knew how to shoulder without buckling beneath it. 

What if it had been Ben? Would it have hurt more, knowing that he loved her? Would it have been kinder to have never said anything at all?

Richie pressed his cheek against the pillow and spoke to a spot beyond Bev’s thigh. “I’m sorry I skipped out on the wake,” he said, lips barely moving. He felt too big for the moment, too loud and brash and bold, the same way he felt throwing the first handful of dirt into the grave. He wasn’t built for moments like these; he was meant for the minutes before, the back-and-forth, the things that didn’t sit quite so heavily in the chest. “I...I couldn’t, Bev. I’m sorry.”

Beverly’s hand drifted across his scalp and settled at the top of his spine. “I know, Richie,” she said, scratching lightly at the fine hairs clustered on the nape of his neck. Something tickled at the back of his mind with the motion, almost like déjà vu, but it was gone before Richie could put a name to the memory that had brushed against his skin. “I just wished you told us.”

“And said what?” He closed his eyes and leaned against her shoulder. There was a hint of perfume on her sweater, bright like mandarin. He pressed his nose against her pulse point, chasing the note. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted softly. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep going.”

Bev hummed and rested her chin on his bent head. He melted into her, a ship to port, and she held him as he began to submit to the exhaustion dragging at his skin. He hadn’t slept properly in so long, even before Mike’s call - he hadn’t really rested since he left for California in ‘94, Eddie’s warm body wrapped around his one last time. The night he promised not to forget Richie despite every shred of evidence proving that he would.

It didn’t feel all that significant at the time, nesting his nose in the hollow of Eddie’s collarbone. He’d fallen asleep as easily as he always did in Eddie’s arms, the loudest rebellion he dared to make. Thoughts of being brave, of asking Eddie to come with him one more time, had dispersed with the smoke; he lay at the juncture of a past he couldn’t change and a future he was too scared to touch, petrified in time. He never really stopped being scared.

At the edge of sleep, looking back on a life he had almost lived, Richie murmured, “It feels like it’s all my fault.”

Bev exhaled. “Oh, honey,” she whispered, so quiet Richie wasn’t sure if she even spoke, “it is.”

* * *

The apartment was flooded with the first weak strains of daylight when Richie woke. There was a soft grumble under his chin and Eddie snuggled closer to his side, exhaling steadily. 

Adrenaline prickled the hairs on Richie’s arms. Despite himself, he ignored it. “Morning,” he murmured instead, turning his head so he could press his lips against Eddie’s mussed crown. Eddie made another pleased sound and let his hand trail down Richie’s flank, stopping to rub little circles onto his hip.

“Hey,” he replied. Richie felt something go loose in his muscles at the sound of his voice, sleepy and muffled. He wasn’t sure why his body had been so stiff, why his neck continued to ache with tension. “You scared the crap out of me.”

Richie chuckled and slid a finger down Eddie’s spine. There were bruises there, darkest at his wings of his shoulder blades and dappling down to a nauseous yellow by the small of his back. No blood, though; no wound at all. A new scar, shiny and pink, felt like silk beneath this fingertips. “Yeah? What did I do this time?”

Eddie was silent for a long moment, breathing against Richie’s chest. When he spoke, there was a horrible resignation to his tone that Richie had never heard before. “I almost lost you.” He squeezed Richie’s waist like Richie was going to leave. “Don’t do that again.”

“Eds, I can’t not do something if you don’t tell me what it is I hypothetically did.” Richie breathed in the sharp, almost spicy tang of Eddie’s shampoo, the warmth that glowed across his skin. He laughed again, nuzzling his face further in Eddie’s hair. “Try saying that three times really fast.”

“Michael doesn’t understand it,” Eddie continued. He wriggled back and propped himself up against Richie’s chest, frowning, and Richie noticed the dark brush of purple beneath his eyes - suitcases more than bags. “Neither do I, which is freaking me the fuck out.”

Richie snorted. “Since does Mike not know shit? He’s, like, if the Old Spice guy mind-melded with Wikipedia.” He reached over and smoothed the cow lick at Eddie’s temple, smiling when it refused to lie flat. “What’s got you worked up, anyway?”

Eddie shuffled further upright so that he was sitting cross-legged with his hands splayed over Richie’s belly. His brow creased further, mouth pinched like he was stopping himself from letting something out. On impulse Richie brushed his thumb over Eddie’s lips, lingering at the corner, and cupped Eddie’s jaw with his palm.

A soft exhale tickled his wrist. Eddie leaned into the touch, eyes slipping shut on instinct, and let himself sway with the motion of Richie’s hand. In, out; steady and constant as a tidal stream. Richie hated himself a little when he interrupted its flow by grasping the nape of Eddie’s neck with his free hand and tugging him closer ‘til their foreheads touched. “What’s going on, Eddie?” he whispered. 

Eddie hummed. “I should have been there,” he breathed against Richie’s cheek. This close, Richie could count the freckles sprinkled across his nose and cheekbones like cinnamon sugar. He wondered if he could kiss every single one of them, if Eddie would let him. “I shouldn’t have left.”

There was a horrible weight to his voice that dragged at his throat and turned each of his vowels into low, rasping things. Richie shook his head and pressed impossibly nearer, his lips a hairsbreadth from Eddie’s. 

“Hey, hey, none of that,” he soothed. He felt more than saw the furrow of Eddie’s brow deepen. “Whatever’s freaking you out, it’s okay now. I’m here.” He paused, swallowing. “ _You’re_ here. I don’t know how but...you’re here. That’s enough for me.”

With no small amount of surprise, he realised it was the truth. Whatever this was - a dream, a haunting, another cosmic prank pulled on the universes’ most gullible idiot - it would be enough for Richie. He survived three decades without letting himself admit that he was okay with not knowing this: the drag of Eddie’s two-day stubble on the pads of his fingers, the tinge of morning breath that lingered between their mouths, the assuredness that came from waking up by someone’s side. Who cared if it wasn’t real? It was the closest he was ever going to get. And that had to be enough, or else he wasn’t sure if he could handle living like this any longer.

It might be weak; it was probably cowardly. He was holding on to something he never had and the only person it was hurting was himself, but that was practically a Richie Tozier guarantee at this point, so really, why not?

“You’re gonna wake up,” Eddie said abruptly. His eyes were open and hard as flint but he didn’t lean back, just kept his gaze on Richie’s with the same determination he showed everything that didn’t fit exactly into his life. “Just - do it when I’m here, okay?”

Richie sighed and looked away. “Can we not do this?” he muttered, cheeks flushing. “I just want to fuckin’ be here with you, man, why do you keep trying to make me wake up?” Something indignant flared low in his stomach and he fought the urge to push Eddie away. If Eddie wanted him to leave, he was going to have to put up a fight. “If you’re not going to explain what the fuck is going on - fine. But don’t make me leave. That’s not -” his voice cracked, splintering clean down the middle, hundreds upon thousands of hairline fissures spreading from the break like weeds. He held his throat together with shaky hands long enough to whisper, threadbare and dizzy, “That’s not fair.”

It wasn’t fair. Nothing about Richie’s life was fair. He couldn’t even pinpoint the moment things went wrong; it was like he was born into celestial disfavour and everything that had happened to him since was an attempt to set the universe right. If that were true, at least all the shit he carried in his bones would mean something. At least there would be a reason why he hurt this fucking bad. 

“Can’t we just - I don’t know. Stay here? For a little while?”

Eddie began to pull away. “Richie -”

“No!” Richie protested, chasing the retreating line of Eddie’s mouth. “No, jackass, let me have this.” He drew in a short, trembling breath, and took with it the last of his fear. He looked up. “I love you,” he said before he could stop himself, “I’ve loved you my entire fucking life and I know you’re gone and I’m losing my mind but _I love you_.” He bit down on his lip hard to stop it from shaking. “I love you so much, Eddie. I never forgot how to and I don’t think I can.”

Eddie’s eyelashes were wet, clumped together like wheat in the rain. They smeared against Richie’s cheek when he bridged the inch of empty air between them and kissed him, so achingly light it barely felt like anything at all. Richie couldn’t move, couldn’t press back, his arms frozen around Eddie’s shoulders as he slowly, surely licked his bottom lip. He was kissing him with such careful, steady motions, as if Richie were about to shatter in his hands, burst into thousands of fractals that knew nothing but the taste of Eddie’s tongue. 

He could die like this. God damn it, he could fucking _die_.

“I love you,” Eddie whispered against his lips. “Come back to me.”

Richie closed his eyes and thought of a lighthouse left to ruin, its ships long since sunk. He thought about Eddie at seventeen looking out to the endless stretch of the Atlantic, his hand held out behind him. He thought, _I want to go home_ , and woke up alone in Beverly’s guest room, his cheeks cold and damp. 

* * *

It was nearing nine by the time he made his way downstairs. There was a single light on in the kitchen and the gentle slide of jazz coming from the corner where Bev was curled around her phone, wine glass in one hand as she texted with the other. Richie stood by the door for a second, taking in the concentrated pinch to her brow and the press of her knees against her chest. She almost looked like the kid Richie had caught glimpses of in middle school, the girl who never looked at him head-on but kept her chin raised when she passed him in the hall. 

That was it, wasn’t it? They’d never really grown up. She was still that girl as much as he was the boy who couldn’t meet her eye. Beverly glanced up at him and started, phone close to slipping out of her hand, and Richie could see her at thirteen, hackles raised before anyone had the chance to catch her off-guard. He held up his hands and chuckled. “Just me,” he said. Her shoulders relaxed as he made his way over to the breakfast nook and took a seat.

“Hey. I was just going to wake you, see if you wanted to order pizza or something.”

“What? I haul ass across Michigan and you can’t even do me the decency of a good home-cooked meal?”

Beverly shot him a withering look. _That_ was something he remembered distinctly. “Do you want pizza or not?”

They split a pepperoni, filling each other in on twenty-seven years worth of untraded stories. Richie told her about his shaky start to stand-up, the comics he brushed shoulders with, the ones he thought were never going to make it and ended up with sold-out shows at the Apollo just to spite him. Bev laughed at all the right moments, beat on beat, her own stories vague and lacking detail. Later, if he was asked to repeat a brief history of Beverly Marsh, the lines would be blurred and indistinct like watercolour on canvas. He figured it was because her asshole ex-husband was hidden in the grain of every brushstroke, his hand guiding her wrist for so long it was as if she never had the strength to hold the rigger herself. 

Now, though - she picked a piece of pepperoni off her cold slice and flicked it at him when he made a bad joke. She pulled out a fresh bottle of chardonnay from the fridge and leant back in her chair, one foot tucked beneath her thigh while the other dangled freely, occasionally grazing Richie’s ankle. The bruising along her forearms was fading and Richie had never felt more proud of anyone in his life, save for Eddie in the moments before he died. This pride, however, had no condition. They wouldn’t be punished for getting drunk on cheap white wine and talking shit late into the night, and that almost made up for the lingering ache behind his sternum that had followed him since waking.

He touched the back of her hand when they had lapsed into a companionable silence. “Hey,” he said quietly, seriously, “I’m proud of you.”

Bev’s eyes flickered down to their hands, then up to his oddly sincere expression. She didn’t ask what he meant, or even if he meant it at all - she twined her fingers through his and squeezed. Richie squeezed back. 

An abrupt chime plucked through the playlist Bev still had on repeat. She slipped her phone from her pocket and skimmed over the message, her eyes gone soft and sad. “Ben’s going to be a week,” she said, placing her phone face-down on the table. “Something about an unfinished contract he has to follow through on.”

Richie winced. “Yeesh, you’re telling me.” Bev glanced at him, puzzled, and he waved her off with his free hand. “Long story; Hollywood bullshit. So, guess I’m sticking around.”

Beverly shook her head. “Look, Richie, you don’t have to -”

“Nuh-uh. I’m your problem now. Besides,” Richie raised their joined hands and kissed her knuckles, “it’s finally my chance to steal you away from Mr January Embers. He might have the words, baby, but I’ve got the _moves_.” He waggled his eyebrows and shimmied in his seat like a suffocating fish. It was worth the inevitable wedgie when Bev snorted, her face crinkled up in the schadenfreude valley between amusement and pity. 

“You’re an idiot,” Bev said fondly, and Richie bit down hard on his tongue. The iron bite of Eddie’s blood welled in his mouth, so thick and potent he wondered whether it would spill out if he spoke. Instead he kept quiet, offering a tight-lipped smile, and let Beverly take the reins of the conversation.

She told him about Chicago, the broad strokes Richie had heard from the mouthpiece of every late-eighties rom-com. He found he didn’t care that she was repeating what he already knew; she gestured widely with her wine, one hand still pressed against Richie’s palm, and it was like the sun reaching its zenith after a grey morning. It felt right to be there, a prism to her endless refraction, catching the lamplight as it bounced from fractal to fractal. He could almost believe they were just two ordinary friends caught the magnetic pull of mundane life, making up stories about the shadows of a far-off fire like they hadn’t fumbled to their feet and turned to face what cast them. Like they didn’t see themselves nested in the hearth, stoking the flames higher.

Richie realised a beat too late that Bev had asked him something. “What?”

She downed the last of her chardonnay and placed the glass none too gently on the table. “I _said_ , is there anything you want to do while you’re here?” Beverly paused. “How much have you had to drink?”

Truthfully, he wasn’t even halfway through his first glass, but playing the drunk was a familiar role to slip into. “We should go to the Bean,” he said, slurring his sibilants like he was gunning for Best Actor in a Skinemax Feature. “Bevvie, can we go see the Bean?”

Beverly wrinkled her nose. “Richie, we are not going to see the Bean.”

“You said anything!”

“You know, I met Anish Kapoor?” Bev giggled and slumped back in her seat. “We were at the same gala thing and my portfolio was on display and he called it derivative. Honest to God, Rich, he said it was _derivative_.” She threw her hands up. “He shoves a giant fucking bean in the Plaza and calls _my work_ derivative?”

Richie was doubled over, forehead to forearm, as he tried to catch his breath. “Who the fuck uses the word derivative?” he wheezed.

“I don’t know!” Beverly shouted, smacking her palm against the table. Richie shrieked with laughter at the pure indignation colouring her cheeks, the irrepressible grin that pulled her lip back and bared her teeth. “He’s the fucking worst.”

Richie grabbed his wine glass and held it up in a sloppy toast. “To Anish Kapoor,” he pronounced, “the fucking worst.”

Bev plucked her own empty glass and raised it to the ceiling. “The fucking worst!” she declared - and for a moment, wonderful and bright, Richie thought that maybe everything was going to be okay. If Beverly was there, things wouldn’t be perfect, but they’d be okay.


	7. Chapter 7

Richie took at least a minute to come up with his question, twirling the stem of a dandelion between his fingers. Stan had been braiding daisies into a chain and let Richie keep any dandelions he came across; he said something about the tensile strength of the stem not being enough to support the weight of the chain. Richie snorted and jabbed Eddie in the stomach with a bony elbow, making some dumb joke that he couldn’t remember the second it left his mouth. Further down the hill Mike and Bill were walking along the quarry’s maw, heads bent together and voices low. It was the last day of summer break before senior year, the last chance they had to bask in waning sunshine of a month well wasted. 

Richie finally cleared his throat and raised his hand, all fingers bar one pressed to his palm. “Never have I ever cheated on a test.”

Stan’s head shot up. “That’s not fair,” he protested hotly, “it was _one time_ -”

“Finger down, Stanny!” Richie rolled on his side and raised an eyebrow at Eddie’s unexpectedly flushed cheeks. Reluctantly, he lowered his pinky. Richie’s mouth dropped open, delighted.

“Don’t,” Eddie muttered before he could say anything. Eddie’s free hand was picking at grass, staining his fingers with vibrant, living green. His mom had managed to keep him indoors for the last two weeks and the usual summer tan that coated his skin like honey had vanished. He looked pale and indistinct, transparent, and Richie wondered what would happen if he took Eddie’s face in his hands and held him up to the sun; whether he’d pull away before he began to disintegrate.

Richie’s teeth sunk into his bottom lip. _Not now,_ he thought. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for or when he would let it happen, but whatever it was, he wasn’t ready. He wasn’t sure if he ever would be. 

Stan cleared his throat. “My turn,” he announced. “Never have I ever…” he paused, squinting in concentration, “never have I ever been dumped by a girl.”

Richie flipped over and shot him a look. Stan stared back, impassive, remaining three fingers held up like a matador’s cape to a frenzied bull - goading in his own refined, quiet way. Richie snorted and dropped his hand, struck from the game.

“Touché,” he said. Stanley’s porcelain expression cracked and he grinned.

“Alright, Eddie, your turn.”

Except Eddie wasn’t listening to Stan - he wasn’t looking at him at all, turned instead to Richie with a sharpness to the set of his mouth that hadn’t been there seconds ago. “Cindy dumped _you_?”

It wasn’t so much a dumping as it was a freefall from the Empire State Building, but Eddie didn’t need to know the particularities. “Yeah,” he replied. “I mean, it was more of a mutual thing, ‘cause of the crabs -”

“Is that why you were so weird at prom?” Eddie interrupted. His hands had curled into fists and Richie couldn’t stop staring at them, the white welts of his knuckles and the raised tendons in his wrist. 

“I wasn’t weird at prom.”

“Yes, you were,” Stan interjected. Richie grabbed a handful of dandelions and threw them over his back, and judging by the indignant spluttering that followed, he might have had a shot at the NBA after all. 

“Look, Eds, it wasn’t a big deal.” Richie reached over and flicked at the jut of his knee, barely touching him at all. “Didn’t think you’d be jealous,” he added as an afterthought. It would make sense if Eddie had a thing for Cindy; she was tall and gorgeous and everything Richie wished he wanted. The only reason she went out with Richie in the first place was to make her ex jealous by hooking up with the least dateable guy in their grade, and Richie went along with it because - well. It was _Cindy Chambers_. No one could call him a homo if his hand was glued to her back pocket. 

“I’m not jealous,” Eddie retorted. The blush had reached his ears, his throat, the back of his neck; he looked ridiculous and Richie had never felt more in love. He didn’t have the words to explain why - it was just one of those things that he knew, deep down in his gut, like the shape of his mom’s arms around his shoulders or his own name. The basic stuff, the things that remained when the rest of him had been coloured over. He felt sick with it, this stupid urge to press his palm to Eddie’s cheek and see if his skin was hot enough to burn the feeling away. 

Stan snorted. When Eddie shot him a filthy look, he laughed harder.

“I’m not!”

“Are too,” Richie replied, unable to keep the goading smirk off his face. Eddie swung back to him, jaw set.

“Am not!” 

“ _Are too_!”

There was a heavy sigh and Stan stood, brushing off his shorts. “Unbelievable,” he muttered under his breath, picking his way down the hill to Mike and Bill. Richie barely even noticed him leave; Eddie’s furious expression, caught somewhere embarrassment and indignation, was as rapturous and all-consuming as a forest fire. He couldn’t look away if he tried.

Which is why it made sense to tackle Eddie where he sat, pulling him down with enough momentum to send them both tumbling further down the incline. Eddie shrieked something outraged and indistinct, his hands trapped between their chests, legs kicking wildly as they came to a stop. Richie couldn’t get enough breath to laugh properly - couldn’t get enough breath to prepare for Eddie flipping them both over, his thighs settling tight around Richie’s waist, straddling his hips triumphantly. 

_Jesus Christ_ , he thought, breathless and warm. If he wasn’t already stupidly in love with this boy he’d be tripping head-over-heels at the sight of him in that moment, framed in sunlight and twice as bright. Eddie’s nose twitched when a loose strand of hair tickled his cheek and Richie stared up at him, back flat to the ground, and wondered if he’d ever find such mundane things fascinating on other people. Probably not; Eddie made the ordinary brilliant. That’s just who he was. Richie could find dozens of boys as funny or cute or whipcord smart, but they wouldn’t hold a candle to Eddie. They couldn’t make the ache in Richie’s bones a thousand times worse, yet all the more bearable. 

He could say it. Stan was far enough away that he could whisper it, so quiet only Eddie would hear. He could tell him what was wrapped around his neck like a noose, like the rising tide threatening to wash over the sand. He could almost reach up and brush their lips together, barely even a real touch, so soft it might just disappear into the air between them. 

Eddie was looking at him. His eyes flickered down, then up to meet Richie’s.

“I wasn’t jealous of you,” Eddie murmured, “I was jealous of _her_.”

Richie’s chest crumbled in on itself, a cavern imploding without a single sound. “You didn’t say that,” he choked out, and it was like dust was collecting in his lungs, solidifying, making it impossible to breathe. Eddie frowned at him, the crease between his brow deepening until it became permanent; other lines were sprouting across his skin, stress and age and only the briefest glimpse of laughter. He opened his mouth to smile but when his lips parted a steady stream of blood began to trickle out, thick and heavy and fast.

“I think I got it, Richie,” he said between gurgling inhales. Richie was paralysed under his hands, frozen from the inside out; the sudden shift from gentle afternoon to the endless cold beneath Neibolt had him cross-eyed and dizzy, unable to focus on Eddie’s blurry face and the incoherent roar of motion behind him. It was happening at all at once: Eddie rushing over to him, Eddie on his knees, Eddie grinning, Eddie’s stomach bursting into a thousand pieces with the short, sharp thrust of a claw, Eddie gasping at the hole in his chest and screaming. 

Without realising it, Richie had started to babble. Something between an apology and a promise, two lies piled on top of each other like hands on a wound, pressing down hard to stop his guts from falling onto the floor. He was screaming too, wordless, terrified; the cave was collapsing in earnest and his own voice was muffled by the gargantuan crack of stalactites cracking, the earth heaving its last death throes. Eddie wouldn’t stop staring at him through it all, his eyes the last points of light in the entire universe, and Richie held his gaze so tight he swore he’d never blink again, he’d never look away, he’d never let Eddie go.

“Richie?” Eddie breathed. His hands had lifted from Richie’s wrists and he touched the edges of the wound, shaking. His eyelids were slipping shut.

“I’m getting you out of here,” Richie shouted, but his body felt too heavy to bear its own weight. Eddie was slumping against him, deflated, and it took all the effort Richie had left in his limbs to prop him upright. “C’mon, Eds, stay awake,” he begged. His voice was hoarse and it hurt to speak, but goddamn, he’d sing if it kept Eddie awake. “Don’t you dare fucking close your eyes, Eddie.”

Eddie smiled. “Okay, Rich,” he said, the words slurring together - his lids were drooping, falling shut with such certainty that Richie knew it was over as soon as he said it. Fuck the cavern falling to pieces around him, this was how Richie would die: with Eddie’s cheek coming to rest on his shoulder, the fight drained from his body before he had a chance to strike back. Richie held him, ribcage pressed against still-lurching chest, and knew the world didn’t have a place for him unless Eddie was there too. 

He pulled back, just far enough to see the glassy sheen to Eddie’s eyes. It was far too familiar, like looking at the back of his own hand, as plain and simple as the sun setting. Richie wanted to feel sick, or horrified, or even just scared, but nothing about this was new. It was a story he always knew would end, always knew would open and close on Eddie - he was stranded on the final page, teeth sunk deep into the binding, too stubborn to move.

If he moved on, Eddie was really gone. Richie buried his nose in Eddie’s damp hair and realised without any small amount of surprise that he was going to stay here, tucked deep in the seconds he held Eddie’s body in his arms. Grief was a place and Richie was boarding up the windows, climbing down the well and holding fast to what he knew without any trace of doubt: where Eddie was, he would be too.

“I’m not leaving,” he said, lips pressed hard to Eddie’s crown, “not this time.”

Not until Eddie didn’t want him any more.

* * *

“You know you talk in your sleep?”

Richie swallowed the last dregs of his coffee and fixed Beverly with a wary look. “I do?”

“Yeah.”

“Weird,” he replied, hand flexing around the mug. “Hey, so about the Bean -”

“Have you talked to anyone, Richie?”

Richie’s jaw clicked shut. Bev was stirring sugar into her second cup of coffee, a soothing rhythm that didn’t belay the tense set of her wrist. Beverly had never been that good at hiding her anger; it seeped from her pores and charged the air with electricity, so volatile the slightest movement could set everything alight. It was kind of scary how easily she set Richie on edge despite the gentle smile she shot at him.

He could tell her about Avery, he supposed, watching the crema settling at the rim of her cup. But talking about Avery broached the enormous gaping sore that was Eddie, and Richie might have beat the shit out a demonic clown when he was thirteen, but fuck if he wasn’t a real coward when push came to shove.

Richie fiddled with the placemat while he tried to find a way to say, in the most loving and appreciative manner, _back the fuck off_. Bringing up Eddie would also brush uncomfortably close to the weirdness that happened back in Philadelphia; he was still convinced he dreamt the conversation between Eddie and Bev, but some instinctive part of him insisted it was real. If it was real, then Richie had far bigger problems than loving a ghost.

Beverly brought the cup to her lips, eyebrows raised over the rim. 

“I haven’t,” Richie said finally, staring down at the weathered tabletop. It had a lacquered finish and when he dug his fingernails against the grain, three small crescents bloomed against the timber. “Kinda dealing with shit as it comes, you know? Greet each new day as a gift or whatever.” He shrugged and released his grip on the table. “I don’t think it’d be right for me to, like, go to some therapist and be like, _hey, my best friend died, but there’s also forty years of other bullshit to sort through, so could you put my head on right so I can deal with the dead friend thing first_?”

“Richie, that’s exactly what a therapist is for.” Beverly said, her voice flat. 

Richie swatted at her skeptical expression. “Nah, too complicated. How the fuck am I supposed to explain it, anyway? How do you separate the weird clown shit from everything else? You can’t tell a shrink half a story, Bev, that doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe,” she shrugged, “or maybe you can just talk about the stuff that’s underneath. What’s really giving you trouble.”

“There _is_ nothing underneath, Bev. It’s clowns all the way down.” He sighed and stretched out his legs. The temptation to change the subject was there, as it always was, but Beverly was the last person he could con out of a serious discussion. They were on the same level, she and him - at least, he thought they were. Now she was having actual breakfast at nine in the morning like a regular person, no trace of sleeplessness beneath her eyes, dressed in a comfortable dressing gown that probably cost more than Richie’s entire improvised duffle-bag wardrobe. She had changed somewhere between childhood and the cavern, between the Orient and last night - Richie just couldn’t parse when it happened, when Beverly had taken her demons by the horns and shaped them into something she could live with. It was disquieting to have her sitting beside him, speaking clearly and rationally, while Richie had woken that morning soaked in sweat.

It was nauseating, looking at Beverly and seeing both the girl he knew and the woman he wanted to know. The rational voice tucked in the corner of his brain wondered what it would be like if he would have the same reaction to Eddie, if he didn’t just exist in his dreams. He wondered if it would matter.

“Trust me, Rich,” Bev said, breaking him from his reverie, “there’s definitely shit going on underneath that.” She paused, swilling her coffee around the cup in gentle, rocking circles. “Did you ever think about why It came after us?”

Richie frowned. “Uh, no? I mean, _we_ were the ones who looked for It. We kicked down Its door like, _come out, come out, you creepy child-molesting motherfucker!_ ” He shook his head. “Jesus, we were so fucking stupid. Who lets kids just turn up at an abandoned house and start poking around? What the fuck was wrong with our parents?”

“Well, my dad didn’t care as long as I wasn’t screwing you,” Beverly replied dryly. “And that’s my point.”

“What, that your asshole father had a totally non-existent gaydar?”

Beverly set down her coffee and reached for his restless hand. “No, dumbass. I was scared, and hurting, and I think that’s why It found me. Found _us_.”

Richie traced the line of a scar over her knuckles, following its twisting path from the juncture of her thumb to the edge of her pinkie. It was a few years old at least, puckering pink at the edges, and reminded Richie of all the times he’d slept with men on tour and told them to leave before he woke up. A lump travelled up his throat, settling just beyond his tongue and too heavy to swallow. 

He wasn’t the only one trying to reconcile two halves of a whole.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly. Beverly scoffed, but it wasn’t a mean sound.

“Of course I am.”

“Yeah,” he laughed, looking up at her through damp eyelashes, “of course you are.”

* * *

Beverly had errands to run in town, and like the loyal self-appointed bodyguard he was, Richie tagged along, tacked to her side like bubblegum on a smoldering sidewalk. No matter how many times he asked - pled, begged, whined - she refused to take him to Millenium Park; instead, they looped around Little Italy to her office on the South Side, slipping through the late September haze that had settled over the city. By the time they reached the Prairie District, Richie’s cheeks were aching more than his legs.

“They don’t have fuckin’ taxis in this city?” 

Beverly snorted and led him through the revolving doors of a nondescript building. “Thought you could do with the exercise,” she said, and waved at the security guard as they passed. Richie stopped two feet into the lobby, hands on his knees as he caught his breath.

“Okay, _ouch_ ,” he panted to the lobby tiles. “I’m way too tired to come up with a witty reply, so imagine I’ve said something smart and hilarious and cutting to totally undermine everything you just said.”

“Uh-huh.” Bev grabbed him by the bicep and tugged. “Come on. Five minutes, then you can be as much of a pissbaby as you want.” 

Richie sighed and let her drag him over to the elevator. “You’re lucky you’re hot.”

“And you’re lucky I know how to deal with overgrown man-children,” she replied simply, her expression still pleasant and genial from greeting the guard. Richie had an unerring suspicion that it was a skill she’d cultivated dealing with him as a child and honed to perfection as she climbed the corporate ladder. For a moment, he didn’t know whether to be deeply offended or incredibly proud.

The elevator doors closed with a soft ding and Beverly turned to him, mouth suddenly tight. “Listen,” she said, catching his gaze, “I don’t know who’s going to be there. It’s Saturday so it should just be the copyeditors, but -” she swallowed, a little unsteady. “But if Tom turns up -”

“Beat his ass to a pulp?”

The corner of her lip ticked upwards. “You could try, but then he’d just use that against me. I’ve already dragged Ben into this; I don’t want you to get involved too.”

Richie slung an arm around her shoulder and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. “Too late,” he huffed into her hair. “I’m your Kevin Costner, baby. Try not to fall in love with me, though; I think we’d make Ben cry.”

“Richie -”

“I know,” he interrupted, the act dropped as quickly as it was picked up. He closed his eyes and inhaled the gentle vanilla of her perfume - soft breath in, hard breath out. Somewhere underneath that, so base and foundational he wondered how he hadn’t noticed before, was the stale tang of cigarette smoke, the same bite as the Camels she used to steal from Keene’s. Two scents; two people; one woman pulling back to catch his eye and stare hard. “I know, Bevvie.” 

He wanted to tell her he was involved anyway; they all were, tangled together like one of those rat kings he learned about in ninth grade biology. As a kid he thought was kind of gross, how they all writhed around and stuck together until they died, but the older he got the more it made sense. The seven of them, crawling over each other, only tightening their binds as they tried to pull further away. When one moved, they all moved - symbiotic, preternatural. Of course he was there, grasping Beverly’s hand and squeezing tight: he could no sooner leave her than deny the sun for rising. It was the way of things in their fucked up little corner of this unknowable world.

Beverly took a short, shallow breath. She gripped his hand, squeezed tight, and let go the second the elevator doors opened to the fifteenth floor.

Richie had even less experience with the fashion industry than he did with women, so he walked through the open-plan office space with precisely zero expectations. It was a lot like every office set in every mediocre sitcom Richie had ever guest starred in - rows of cubicles, a touch tidier than CBS backlot, and barely a model in sight. A low murmur blanketed the floor, snaps of conversation mixing with the occasional text chime or polite titter of laughter. The only thing that separated it from Richie’s presupposition of an office was the sporadic peak of fabric through a glass door, flutters of silk and acrylic disappearing before he had a chance to catch their colours.

Beverly’s office was at the end of a long corridor. “I wanted to be out in the bullpen,” she told him, digging her keys from her bag, “but Tom said it looked unprofessional.”

“Well that’s bullshit.” Richie’s gaze caught on the door adjacent to hers with its chrome name-plate. _T. Rogan, Chief of Operations._ The temptation to grab a sharpie and draw a tasteful dick next to his title was almost too strong to resist. 

“You’re telling me,” Bev said, and unlocked the door. It opened to reveal a sterile white room, barren save for a simple desk in the centre and its sparse furnishings. Richie blinked.

“Uh, are you sure we’re in the right room?”

Beverly squinted at him. “Yeah,” she said, “this is my office. Why, what’s wrong?”

“It’s just -” _weird_ , he thought, _and not weird in a funny way, weird in a ‘holy shit, who are you and what have you done with Beverly Marsh?’ way, weird like I don’t know if you’ve changed or I have, but either way this picture doesn’t match the one in my head and_ that _is weird_. “Different,” he finished lamely. “It’s just different.”

He was waiting for colour to unravel from the walls, for traces of Beverly to leach out of the cracks and turn the place into something he remembered. Well, not remembered, exactly - _expected_. The way he expected two and two to equal four, past-Beverly and present-Beverly to equal the Beverly who straddled the years between both. The office was too clean, too generic, too white and bright and open. Not wrong, but not necessarily right.

“I do most of my work from home,” Bev explained. She was rifling through the drawers, stacking folders on her desk haphazardly as she searched. “The office was more of a formality, you know - something to put on the tax return.” She glanced up, grimacing. “Or not.”

Richie swiped a marble paperweight from her desk and pointed it at her accusingly. “Beverly Marsh, are you implying that you’ve committed tax fraud?”

“You’ve literally killed someone, Richie,” she pointed out for the second time in as many days, diving back under the desk. “Neither of us has the moral high ground here.”

“Yeah, but my thing was justified. We’ve been over this; he had it coming.”

Beverly scoffed. “Do _not_ start singing Cell Block Tango.”

“I wasn’t going to!” 

“You were thinking about it.”

Richie set the paperweight back with slightly more force than necessarily. “You’re no fun,” he whined. “What happened to fun Beverly?”

It was a joke - almost. A tiny kernel of genuine discontent was nestled beneath, shell cracked to the first glance of sunlight. 

“I can be fun!” she protested, resurfacing with a slim manila folder in her grasp. Her eyes cast low, she placed the other documents back in the drawer with short, sharp movements. “I’ve just...got a lot on my mind, you know. It’s hard to focus on other stuff.”

The teasing smile slipped off Richie’s face. “Oh. Right. Yeah, of course.” He coughed and turned on his heel to stare out the east-facing window. The last of the afternoon’s light painted the high rises in honey, warm and sweet; the people below waded through it, sticky bodies stuck together in pairs, so small Richie felt as though he could reach through the glass and squash them beneath his thumb. He used to do that to ants skittering across the sidewalk, until Eddie got upset and told him to stop. Eddie was the only one who could ever tell him to stop.

He wondered if Eddie would tell him to stop now, and whether he’d even listen. 

It was Eddie’s idea to leave Derry the night they arrived. He’d torn through the townhouse with his jaw set, pulling Richie through the lobby without even touching him. He had been talking the whole time, ranting, stomping up the stairs like he could stamp down all the memories that were bubbling to the surface. _Fuck this town_ , he said, short and sharp and so bitter he made Richie’s teeth ache with the force of his voice. _What the fuck has this place ever done for us?_

 _It gave me you_ , he wanted to say, but the words shrivelled in his mouth as soon as they rose from his throat. It hadn’t felt right then; the closest he came to feeling ready was when they stood outside the house on Neibolt street, faces cast in shadow.

If he’d done it - if he’d told him then, taken his hand and refused to let go - would he be here now? Would they be down there on the street, pinpricks of normalcy, indistinct enough to blend in with the city? He wasn’t sure if people like him and Eddie were meant for a normal life. It was like Bev said: there was a reason It had caught their scent and stalked their memories. There was something buried in them, beneath Derry itself, that opened its arms to the violence, the affection, the enormity of cruelty and love. And for all that he hated it, hated how he was made of it, Richie couldn’t ignore that the willingness to be touched, and to touch in return, is what made him fall in love with Eddie. It was what kept him in love when he couldn’t remember Eddie’s name but knew there was a body missing beside him. 

Looking down at the clusters of people below, their bodies pressed so close together he couldn’t see where one ended and the other began, Richie felt something cold and final settle low in his stomach. _There’s no me without you_ , he told the glass with his fingertips. _At least, not how I was._

 _I think I died too_.

If Eddie was here, if he’d looked back when he felt Richie’s eyes on his neck, if he knew how deeply he was soaked into Richie’s skin - it didn’t _matter_. Richie was in Beverly’s office at four in the afternoon and Eddie was dead. Whoever he saw in his dreams - whoever told him it was going to be okay, that he’d just wake up and it would all be a bad dream - wasn’t going to be Eddie, no matter how much he wished it was, no matter how hard he pretended. 

He should let go.

He stepped back from the window, fists curled by his sides. “You got it?” he asked without turning around. There was a moment of silence and he saw the faint reflection of Bev’s back straightening, her expression clearing.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I think we got what we came for.”

**Author's Note:**

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